For companies, selecting employees is the first step in human resource management. How to choose suitable employees and whether they can contribute to the company in the future are the key points of recruitment. Therefore, how to identify the right candidate (Mr. Right) through their performance in a short interview becomes particularly important.
Besides the interviewee’s verbal communication skills, HR also evaluates their personality traits through nonverbal behaviors such as body language, eye contact, and gestures. This helps predict future job performance. Nonverbal behavior is very intuitive and direct. For example, in a sales position, natural eye contact and smiling can build trust with clients. For a marketing department, which deals with rapid market changes and requires high stress resistance, an interviewee who claims to be suitable but is visibly nervous and fidgety may reveal characteristics not expressed verbally.
This is why many companies prefer face-to-face interviews over phone interviews, as it allows HR to make more precise hiring assessments, with nonverbal behavior playing a significant role. Although nonverbal behaviors arising from interviewees’ backgrounds, personalities, genders, and ethnicities may be interpreted differently by different HR professionals, and may vary in significance for different positions, generally, among candidates with similar skills, nonverbal behaviors help HR choose the candidate who best fits the company.
Moreover, compared to structured interviews, unstructured interviews, with their open-ended questions and casual conversations, allow interviewees to relax and exhibit more nonverbal behaviors, providing HR with more information to judge personality traits and predict future job performance.
The importance and impact of nonverbal behavior go beyond HR evaluating interviewees; HR’s nonverbal behavior also affects the interviewee’s responses and performance. In other words, HR’s reactions to interviewees directly influence their performance. Even HR’s personal characteristics, gender, and ethnicity can affect interviewees.
The conclusion of this study emphasizes that HR’s inference of interviewees’ traits based on a greater number of nonverbal behavior cues usually leads to a more accurate understanding of the interviewees’ actual personal characteristics.
Therefore, how to observe these nonverbal behaviors in interviews without affecting the interviewees’ performance or causing cognitive bias due to HR’s subjective judgment is a crucial issue.