The question
Why do employers keep using unstructured interviews and gut judgment to hire, when decades of evidence say structured tests and mechanical scoring predict job performance better?
The method
A focal review article synthesizing I-O psychology’s selection literature, plus a survey of HR professionals run by one of Highhouse’s students [1] and Highhouse’s own policy-capturing study of retail managers’ hiring decisions [2].
The findings
HR professionals, asked directly, agreed by more than 3 to 1 that tests are an effective way to evaluate candidates [2] — and, in the same survey, agreed by more than 3 to 1 that an informal conversation lets them “read between the lines” [2]. Two implicit beliefs drive the gap. First, that near-perfect prediction of job success is achievable at all, when a large share of the variance in who succeeds is simply not knowable at the time of hire — “irreducible unpredictability” [3]. Second, a “myth of expertise” — that experience makes someone a better intuitive judge of candidates. On that second point the paper cites the finding that interviewing experience does not improve accuracy: differences between interviewers’ validity are attributable to sampling error, not skill [3] (citing Pulakos, Schmitt, Whitney, & Smith, 1996), and even a well-run unstructured interview explains no more than about 10% of the variance in job performance [3] (citing Conway, Jako, & Goodman, 1995).
The limits
This is a review aggregating other researchers’ meta-analyses rather than new data of its own; the strongest original contributions are Highhouse’s retail-manager policy-capturing study [2] and his student’s unpublished HR survey [1] — both single-sample and not independently peer-reviewed as reported here.