There is also evidence that female interviewees may be judged by their clothing ; Forsythe, Drake, and Cox (1985)

found that women were given higher ratings by personnel managers when they were dressed in a more masculine dark tailored suit and white bloused than when they were dressed in a feminine light beige dress of soft fabric. This topic has not received much subsequent attention from I/O psychologists, but evidence from the field confirms the basic premise in a new from. Many women in positions of responsibility are unhappy with the casual-Friday or business-casual dress codes organizations are adopting. In response to one survey, a female financial executive wrote : Women are assumed to be in lower-level positions. Business clothing can override that impression, but casual clothes do not. (quote in Callender, 1996, p. 11) When interviewers distort interview results through bias and stereotyping, it is interviewee characteristics and behavior that elicit these responses. Relatively less is known about how interviewer characteristics and behavior as such may affect the outcome of a job interview. An exception is a study by Baron (1993), who found that interviewer mood (positive or negative) significantly affected interview ratings of job applicants who appeared to be unqualified for the job (negative mood, poorer evaluation; positive mood, no effect). There is also a line of research suggesting that interviewers preinterview expectations about a job candidate may have considerable influence on their conduct and evaluation of the interview (e.g., Macan, & Dipboye, 1994; Phillips & Dipboye, 1989). In one field study, for example, research found that interviewers gave more information, did more selling of the company, and asked for less information from applicants whose paper credentials were perceived to be more favorable (Dougherty, Turban, & Callender, 1994). Finally, Snyder, Berscheid, and Matwychuk (1988) report that people who are highly conscious of their own behavior when they are around other people place greater importance on the appearance of job candidates than do other interviewers. The biases describe do not affect all interviewers all the time. The impact of such variables often depends on the amount and kind of other information about the interviewee that is available (e.g., Gifford, Ng, & Wilkinson, 1985; Huffuct, McDaniel, & Roth, 1996; Ramussen, 1984). Characteristics of the situations as listed in Figure 4-1 also play a role. If there is only qualified candidate for an important job (a selection ratio of 1:1) and the interviewer knows that his or her superior recommended this individual (a political factor), the candidate may receive a favorable interview report whatever the interviewers personal opinion of him or her. The possibility of bias on the other side of the job interview table has been give far less attention than interviewer bias and stereotypes. It seems likely, however, that this factor also reduces the validity of the interview as a predictor of job success. Information about what turns job interviewers on or off is now widely available to job seekers (see Exhibit 4-5). Also available are interview-training workshops that teach participants the ins and outs of making a favorable impression. With the help of such information, job applicants have become increasingly sophisticated as regards understanding the behaviors and question responses that impress recruiters and interviewers.

Improving The Interview The weakness of employment interviews have been recognized for many years (Wagner, 1949). Still, organizations have not given them up, nor will they; they believe there is no acceptable substitute for seeing and talking to job applicants. It is fortunate, then, that many people are much better at performing this function than the research findings sampled might suggest. Training interviewers sometimes helps them become more effective also (Dougherty, Ebert, & Callender, 1986), but the research in this area remains inconclusive (Harris, 1989). An alternative strategy is to change the form of the interview itself. One of the very first strategies tried for improving the interview was to change it from the typical freeflowing, open-ended, conversational form to a structured interaction. McMurrys (1947) patterned interviewers to use a printed form detailing specific items to be covered, how information was to be recorded, and how