Technology and Discourse: A Comparison of Face-to-face and Telephone Employment Interviews

Very little research has investigated the comparability of telephone and face-to-face employment interviews. This exploratory study investigated interviewers' questioning strategies and applicants' causal attributions produced during semi structured telephone and face-to-face graduate recruitment interviews (N=62). A total of 2044 causal attributions were extracted from verbatim transcripts of these 62 interviews. It was predicted that an absence of visual cues would lead applicants to produce, and interviewers to focus on, information that might reduce the comparative anonymity of telephone interviews. Results indicate that applicants produce more personal causal attributions in telephone interviews. Personal attributions are also associated with higher ratings in telephone, but not face-to-face interviews. In face-to-face interviews, applicants who attributed outcomes to more global causes received lower ratings. There was also a non-significant tendency for interviewers to ask more closed questions in telephone interviews. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed

Human Resource Flexibility as a Mediating Variable Between High Performance Work Systems and Performance

Much of the human resource management literature has demonstrated the impact of high performance work systems (HPWS) on organizational performance. A new generation of studies is emerging in this literature that recommends the inclusion of mediating variables between HPWS and organizational performance. The increasing rate of dynamism in competitive environments suggests that measures of employee adaptability should be included as a mechanism that may explain the relevance of HPWS to firm competitiveness. On a sample of 226 Spanish firms, the study’s results confirm that HPWS influences performance through its impact on the firm’s human resource (HR) flexibility

Information Exchange in Personnel Selection Decisions

Personnel selection decisions often involve group decisions in which individual group members do not share all the available information about candidates. Serial interviews are one example of this situation. Although serial interview techniques are commonly used to select employees, the selection literature has not extensively investigated serial interviewing, especially the process of coming to a selection decision as a group at the conclusion of the process. The information exchange literature is used to shed light on this process. Results showed that groups often failed to exchange sufficient information to come to the correct decision, discussed a higher proportion of negative than positive information, and discussed more information that was already common knowledge to all group members than information initially known only to one member. Implications for selection procedures are discussed