Have you ever been through a job interview that just drained you?
When you left, it felt like you’d just spent an hour on the treadmill while you had the flu.
Okay, maybe that’s extreme, but interviewing can be tough.
When you sail through an interview and walk out going, “Wow! Nailed it. That was easy,” you may well have nailed it, and you may get the job, but you may not love it.
A new study by Glassdoor found that a tough interview is highly correlated with a satisfying job.
They found that employees who go through a more difficult job interview were more likely to be satisfied with the resulting job. This held true in six countries–the United States, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany and France. A 10 percent increase in job interview difficulty resulted in a 2.6 percent higher employee satisfaction in the job.
Why on earth would this be the case? Why would a hiring manager who asks the hard questions and maybe has candidates do difficult tasks make an environment that is better for the employee? Why would an employee be more satisfied in their job? Here are some ideas.
To keep reading, click here: Fret Not: Study Shows Hard Interviews Result In Better Jobs
The first theory that came to my mind goes like this:
Suppose you’re hiring for 1 position, and you get 2 candidates. Let’s take as given that you definitely need to hire one of them. So, the interview only needs to be hard enough to eliminate one candidate, which is probably not very hard. On the other hand, only 2 people applied for the job; what are the chances it’s absolutely amazing? If it is, great, but nearly everyone else applying for jobs didn’t think it was going to be.
Now suppose you’re hiring for 1 position, and you get 100 candidates. The interview, on average, needs to be much more difficult to eliminate 99 people from the running. But 100 people wanted that job! There’s probably a reason it was really attractive to so many, and a more desirable job makes for a happier employee.
The interview should be tough but not ridiculous. I’ve heard of interviews that go on for 4 hours and not choose that candidate. What a terrible experience for a candidate that may be good fit in another part of the organization. A challenging interview probably does lead to a rewarding job but I warn hiring managers to overdue the difficulty just for the sake of being tough.
Yep, “hard” interviews lead to better jobs; Or is it “more thorough” interviews lead to a better fit? I do hope that hiring managers get that “hard” isn’t better.
I’ve been through some really tough interviews – and by tough, I mean, I don’t know what they are looking for, they just seem to want to put the interviewee through the wringer.
I’ve also been through some very thorough interviews; those are the companies that I’ve worked for and enjoyed as I knew what I was getting into and they knew what I was capable of giving them. I should also note that thorough also means interviewing is a 2-way street and they allow/encourage that.
Lastly, I fear there are a lot of recruiters/hiring managers who read “hard” interviews make for better, more satisfied employees, and think that they need to be jerks when interviewing. In my experience they also tend to be the same folks who, after you’ve spent several hours or more interviewing with several folks in their organization, don’t even bother with following up to inform you that they hired someone else.