TOW #26 - The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

On April 8th, 2017, the New York Times published an article written by Jason Dana, an assistant professor of management and marketing at Yale, about the importance of a pre-job interview in today’s society. Having much knowledge about management and the interview process due to his profession, Dana speaks out about interviews, claiming that they are not necessary to the hiring process and should no longer be used. In order to establish this point, Dana employs bold diction and researched information from lab studies.

Towards the beginning of the article, Dana begins to outline how the interview process leaves an impression on those that are hiring. He goes on to add that “Research that my colleagues and I have conducted shows that the problem with interviews is worse than irrelevance: They can be harmful, undercutting the impact of other, more valuable information about interviewees.” (Dana 5). The powerful words that Dana uses in this section of his article supply a reaction to the reader from his very bold claim. This causes the reader be brought in more to what he has to say, ultimately causing some to be more open to the ideas of the author. This overall allows for Dana to spread his message to more readers. He continues to build strength by adding in information from studies like the one previously mentioned.

Dana speaks about one of the more recent studies that he had partaken in, in which reporters were asked to conduct interviews that were random rather than the typical rigidly structured interview that some companies stick to. He asserts the results writing, “Strikingly, not one interviewer reported noticing that he or she was conducting a random interview. More striking still, the students who conducted random interviews rated the degree to which they “got to know” the interviewee slightly higher on average than those who conducted honest interviews.” (Dana 10). With this information, the author is able to further bolster their ethos through the providing of researched information that supports the earlier bold claim of the uselessness of formulaic job interviews. This is also able to strengthen ethos since this was a study that the author himself worked on, and did not just receive the info from another source. Through this, Dana is able to create an argument that is more convincing to a reader.

Overall, I do believe that Dana was able to effectively show that job interviews, as they exist today, are more of a hassle than they are useful. They do not seem to provide interviewers with the correct information on an interviewee and often undercut the qualifications that a person may have.