15-second rule

We are all familiar with the 5-second rule: You accidentally drop a cookie on the floor, but if you pick it up within 5 seconds then you have successfully rescued it before it could absorb a lethal dose of pathogens.

The 15-second rule is a little different.

And since this is the time of the year for interviews, it is an appropriate point for exploration. You may have heard the advice that first impressions are very important. My dad, who spent much of his career as a recruiter at colleges for one of the Big Eight accounting firms shares his perspective; he said that he knew within the first 30 seconds of an interview if he wanted to hire the person, and then spent the next 30 minutes trying verify it. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, cites research by Frank Bernieri that suggests that it is the first 15 seconds of a job interview that dictates the outcome. The study rated candidates on nine criteria based on a 30 minute interview. A second set of evaluators were only shown a 15-second video clip of the candidates and their rankings were compared to the rankings from that of the full interview and … the rankings matched up! 15 seconds equals 30 minutes. One conjecture offered to explain this phenomenon is that this is an instinctual response that has enabled humans to successfully ascertain friend from foe when we existed in a less civilized state.

K. J. Maher’s 1995 study, The Role of Cognitive Load in Supervisor Attributions of Subordinate Behavior, finds that leaders will classify employees based on initial stereotyping. The leader’s initial classification gains permanence due to the limited interaction between the supervisor and the staff. Another reason the stereotyping remains stable is that the leaders tend to suffer from high cognitive load (which is a fancy way of saying that they are too busy to reconsider the first impression).

Attribution Theory involves the manner in which people seek to divine a reason for the success or failures of others (Martinko, 1995). The four rationales typically used to make this determination are based on a presumption of a persons’ ability, an assumption of the level of effort required to gain success, the complexity of the task, and luck. These beliefs then influence subsequent behaviors, which then perpetuate the initial belief. So contrary to Popeye’s adage, “ I am what I am”; you are what I think you are.

So, how can the interview process be structured to lesson the effects of the 15-second rule? The first thing to do is to confront the issue head on and inform the members of the committee. Personally, I distribute pages 380-387 from Gladwell’s book and make it a point of conversation. But since it is so instinctual, wariness must be reinforced with some frequency. Being cognizant of the impact of first impressions is important to maintaining validity of your committees’ interview protocols. In Denis Phillips’ work on subjectivity and objectivity, he advocates that researchers must show that they have examined their bias and predictions about the outcome of their study.

Examine your predictions.

One of the perks of being an adult is the ability to go ahead and eat a cookie that has fallen to the floor without being scolded (Unless you count your mother’s voice in your head that says, no, you shouldn’t be doing this). If we want to, we can ignore the 5-second rule. We may also wish to ignore the 15-second rule. In fact, if it is indeed an instinctual response honed over the ages to meet the demands of a potentially savage world, then perhaps we should embrace the 15-second rule.

In the context of embracing the 15-second rule, an interview might just consist of sharing a pitcher of milk and cookies and using the vibe of a social setting to ascertain the compatibility of the candidate. If that sounds too casual, then there is another way to structure an interview that provides time for socializing and at the same time avoids some of the flaws inherent to committee work (for details see my January, 2010 blog, Committee Work?); try a round robin one-on-one interview. Each committee member is housed in a separate room with their own set of questions and they rotate in a new candidate every 15 minutes. It may only take 10 minutes to complete the questions, allowing 5 minutes of social inquiry that can help repudiate or reinforce the first impression. Before the committee reconvenes, each member independently ranks the candidates and then the opinions are aggregated before a discussion of relative merits occurs. A bonus to this process is the rotation allows you to complete four separate hour-long interviews in one hour!

The 15 second Rule; embrace it or try to eviscerate it, but the minimum is to acknowledge that it has potential to permanently influence decisions about the people you will hire to teach our children for the next 35 years. 15 seconds = 35 years, that stat alone should be enough to scare you into changing your ways. How does the 5-second rule for food fallen to the filthy pet-hair-covered-stinky-bare-foot-walked-on-germ-infested kitchen floor influence your decision making? Go ahead, eat that cookie...

Make a good day,
Tod

PS. Gladwell, M. (2009). What the dog saw: And other adventures. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

PSS. Maher, K. J. (1995). The role of cognitive load in supervisor Attributions of subordinate behavior. In M. Martinko (Ed.), Attribution Theory: An organizational perspective (pp.7-14). Delray Beach, Fla.: St. Lucie Press.

PSSS. Martinko, M. J. (1995). The nature and function of attribution theory within organizational sciences. In M. Martinko (Ed.), Attribution Theory: An organizational perspective (pp.7-14). Delray Beach, Fla.: St. Lucie Press. Google books: http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_J1rdq_lKH8C&oi=fnd&pg=PA193&dq=%22k+j+maher%22+role+of+cognitive+load&ots=DWQEs3cy3x&sig=AoiN3VRTRRv7QgxmErM7ZHuaJHk#v=onepage&q&f=false

PSSSS. Phillips, D.C. (1990). Subjectivity and objectivity: An objective inquiry. In Eisner and Pushkin (Eds.), Qualitative Inquiry in Education: The continuing debate.

PSSSSS. Popeye: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/12/09/popeye