Do job interviews give you the jitters?
For Julie McCarthy, assistant professor in organizational behaviour at the University of Toronto at Scarborough’s Division of Management and at the Rotman School of Management, necessity really is the mother of invention.
As a graduate student in industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Western Ontario from 1996 to 2002, McCarthy also worked as a consultant developing employee selection tests for large corporations, as well as the Canadian military.
“When discussing my work with clients and colleagues, I would often hear, ‘I absolutely dread the job application process and find that I am very nervous and tense in job interviews.’ This anxiety component was a theme that continuously surfaced.”
Intrigued, McCarthy decided to investigate and found that “there was virtually no research on applicant anxiety in job interview contexts. There is a lot about stress in the workplace, but not about the nervousness people experience when trying to get a job.”
She decided to focus her research on this area, but realized that “before I could look scientifically at anxiety in job interviews, I would need a valid and reliable measure.”
With doctoral funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), McCarthy developed the “Measure of Anxiety in Job Interviews,” which helps to explore the possible effects of applicant anxiety in interview contexts. The measure also assists in the diagnosis and treatment of interview anxiety.
McCarthy worked with Western’s Richard Goffin to develop the instrument. It evaluates five dimensions of potential anxiety in an interviewee:
Communication Anxiety (feeling nervous about being able to communicate, as well as having effective listening skills)
Appearance Anxiety (worrying about how one looks)
Social Anxiety (feeling apprehensive about behaving in a socially acceptable way during the interview)
Performance Anxiety (worrying about how one’s level of performance during the interview measures up)
Behavioural Anxiety (reflected by functions such as rapid heart rate and sweating)
Using this measure, McCarthy has found that job applicants who reported high levels of interview anxiety had significantly lower levels of performance during an interview, especially those with high levels of communication and appearance anxiety.
McCarthy says this finding has serious implications for job seekers. “Some people might be nervous in the interview, but would perform well on the job. Still, they would be less likely to be hired because of their poor performance in the interview. As a result, companies and organizations may be missing out on some great employees simply because of anxiety during interviews.”
She also found that interviewers are often not accurate in recognizing an interviewee’s anxiety. “If interviewers incorrectly assume that a candidate is anxious, then they are likely to rate them lower on interview performance. Consequently, the job interview process will be less accurate in predicting the best employee for the job.”
With her work now recognized through publication in Personnel Psychology, the leading journal of the organizational psychology field, McCarthy is setting out (with a new SSHRC grant) to investigate the links between applicant anxiety, interview performance and job performance to determine the actual relationship between levels of interview anxiety and how they translate to success in the job.