Decision Time
Decision Time
Whilst a typical job interview can easily last a minimum of 1 hour, 52% of interviewers make their decision about a candidate within the first 15 minutes of the job interview. This is according to a study published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.
Researchers took feedback from 166 interviewers before and after they interviewed 691 students at a career fair. One question was how long it took the interviewer to come to a conclusion about hiring the candidates.
Almost 5% of interviewers had made their decision within the first minute of the interview, and nearly 30% within five minutes. However, 22.5% of interviewers had not made their mind up by the end of the interview and needed additional time to come to a decision.
A conclusion from the study could be that as most hiring decisions are made in the first five to fifteen minutes of a job interview, if yours lasts for fewer than 30 minutes, it probably wasn’t that successful. The study also showed that candidates who engaged the interviewer in conversation unrelated to the structured interview were given greater consideration than those who did not.