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