Assessing interpersonal skills in job interviews using scalable and standard methods for measuring nonverbal behavior encoding and decoding accuracy. (with Prof.Marianne Schmid Mast)
In the recruitment process, not only competencies and technical skills are evaluated and matched with the job description. Interpersonal social skills (or soft skills) such as being able to read others accurately is an asset in the workplace (Elfenbein, Foo, White, Tan, & Aik, 2007; Hall, Andrezejewski, & Yopchick, 2009). Current recruitment practice often involves a recruiter making subjective assessment in the later stages of interviewing, or lengthy screening protocols that are too costly for filling junior positions. In an ongoing CTI (Innoswiss) project we aim to improve interpersonal skill assessment of job candidates by proposing scalable and standardized methods to assess both encoding and decoding skills. I will outline the project and present different lines of ongoing data collection with preliminary results focusing on reliability. The first line of study is automated analyses of video resumes and job interviews, linking detected nonverbal behavior features to relevant skills and traits. The second line of study is the development of a new performance-based interpersonal sensitivity test in the workplace, based on perceptions of multi-channel nonverbal behaviors. Finally, we aim to assess the predictive value of encoding and decoding accuracy for hirability evaluation and hiring decision.