This week: Let your interviewers focus on the candidate, not on “selling” the company

Members of SAP SuccessFactors’ Value Realization Research team are constantly reading up on the topics most important to you, your employees, and your managers. Each week we will be sharing an interesting finding we’ve read about to give you innovative and data-based ideas on how to better structure your HR processes and more effectively manage your workforce.

This week: Let your interviewers focus on the candidate, not on “selling” the company

In today’s increasingly competitive world of work, we want to make sure we are attracting the best and the brightest to work at our organizations. A critical piece of this is the job interview—an applicant needs to be able to sell themselves as a qualified candidate, but the interviewer also needs to be able to sell the company as an excellent place to work. However, recent research suggests that focusing on selling the company might hinder an interviewer’s ability to actually determine whether a candidate will be the right choice. In their study published in the Academy of Management Journal, Marr (Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business) and Cable (London Business School) found that interviewers that were more oriented towards “selling” were far less accurate in predicting how successful a candidate would be in the role because their focus on selling impeded their judgment. These findings suggest that organizations should find ways to sell themselves outside of the job interview in order to ensure the candidates selected will be the right ones.

For more information, access the research abstract and full article here.