Why Not Interview?

Abstract. Honesty-Humility is a valuable predictor in personnel selection; however, problems with self-report measures create a need for new tools to judge this trait. Therefore, this research examines the interview as an alternative for assessing Honesty-Humility and how to improve judgments of Honesty-Humility in the interview. Using trait activation theory, we examined the impact of interview question type on Honesty-Humility judgment accuracy. We hypothesized that general personality-tailored questions and probes would increase the accuracy of Honesty-Humility judgments. Nine hundred thirty-three Amazon Mechanical Turk workers watched and rated five interviews. Results found that general questions with probes and specific questions without probes led to the best Honesty-Humility judgments. These findings support the realistic accuracy model and provide implications for Honesty-Humility-based interviews.