Scheller Professor Offers Advice for Successful Job Interviews

New research from Brian Swider, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology—Scheller College of Business, may help students to secure a job after graduation.

Swider is an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Scheller, where he recently worked alongside both undergraduate and graduate students to investigate what makes a job interview successful. The study, which was cited by the British Psychological Society Research Digest, looked at mock interviews with 163 undergraduates who were currently preparing for real job interviews just a week later.

Researchers were interested in knowing whether the candidate’s performance during the “rapport-building” period—the first few minutes of idle conversation and connecting with an interviewer—would ultimately affect their overall success in the interview. For the study, interviewers consisted of 54 graduate students in human resources, who were asked to follow a specific template for the interview: two to three minutes discussing topics unrelated to the job, followed by 12 job-related questions.

In order to determine whether or not the “rapport-building” time made a different, researchers recorded just the segment with job-related questions, which they shared with other graduate students who rated their success.

Researchers discovered that the interviewer’s rating was indeed markedly different from the ratings of outsiders, suggesting at least in part that the rapport-building time was an important factor in how a candidate was perceived, and their ultimate success in the interview.

The grad students who only saw the videos also rated interviewees on factors such as physical appearance, body language, and voice, and these students in turn were also successful with the interviewers themselves.

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