Structured Interviewing: A Note on Incremental Validity and Alternative Question Types

The study assesses whether a structured interview can have incremental validity in the prediction of job performance beyond a battery of cognitive ability tests and whether future-oriented (e.g., situational) or past-oriented (e.g., behavior description) questions have higher validity. A 30-item structured interview, with 15 future and 15 past questions, and a battery of nine tests were correlated with job performance in a sample of 70 pulp mill employees. All measures exhibited high variance and high reliability. Uncorrected validities were .50 for the interview and .46 for the tests, and the interview had incremental validity beyond the tests. The validity for past questions (.51) was higher than for future questions (.39), but not significantly higher. However, past questions showed incremental validity beyond future questions (but not vice versa), and both question types had incremental validity beyond the tests.