We’ve noticed that evaluators often make incorrect assessments when real-world conversational models are accidentally applied to online interactions. Someone with whom you’re conversing online might come across as “obnoxious” because they’re loud. But of course, loudness may just be an artifact of people’s uncertainty about how sound is reproduced in virtual meetings. One must also be careful not to allow frustration at the medium to seep through to a judgment of the participant. When calls hang or meetings lag, subsequent discussion might suffer extra scrutiny, much as bad handwriting might cause readers to disbelieve its contents. Keep your cool, and realize that you are looking at distorted filters, so to speak.
By the way, these questions are sufficiently complex that they can provide an interesting interview question:
That will test rather quickly a person’s understanding of a product’s limitations and advantages (“How does Zoom really work anyway?” “What makes a personal meeting a good one?”) and also a person’s introspective abilities and social abilities. The candidate likely has been doing numerous online and in-person interviews. How did those go? How did they feel, and how did the types of interview feel different? How would the candidate articulate those differences? These questions test self-awareness and articulateness and also a person’s ability to focus on a task they need to excel at—in this case, the interview process.
Or try this tougher one:
Not only are we suggesting that question, but we’d like to spend the rest of this chapter answering it. The online medium is different from face-to-face interactions. But how? And how can you turn those differences to your advantage, or at least minimize their disadvantages?
Even before COVID-19, people were using virtual meetings with increasing frequency, and it’s safe to say that this will continue when the crisis passes. Daniel’s company, Pioneer, interviews and advises people around the world, mostly online, and the same is true for Tyler’s Emergent Ventures. Well before the pandemic, we had Skype and, later, Zoom calls virtually every day. These days there is also “virtual lunch” persisting as a thing, webinars replacing many public talks, university classes moving fully or partially online, Zoom dating, Clubhouse, BlueJeans, Houseparty, and much more.
Furthermore, talent search has become more global, and so if you are speaking to a possible hire in Mumbai or Lagos, that will likely be done online, at least for the early rounds of the process and, as is increasingly common, perhaps for the entire process. Even if the person is merely across town, traffic congestion, office bookings, or scheduling constraints all might favor online contact.
How to do an online interview is one of the questions we receive most often, and unfortunately there is not yet a solid body of research on the best methods. Nor do most books on talent search and management reflect the new realities of how humans now communicate. Because of the lack of research or years of established best practices, this chapter is necessarily more speculative than the others, but we feel confident that our basic conclusions are useful.
Some fundamental truths remain the same for online connections: you need to be trustworthy, and to establish trust you need to start a natural conversation. As you know from the previous chapter, this requires finding a way to engage with the interview subject. But what in the online format is different? Why does this work differently than in an in-person meeting?
For one thing, with an online interview it is much harder to use body language and eye contact to bond and to establish trust. With a Zoom call, for instance, you see the person’s face and background in two dimensions, but usually not more.
Among other limitations, you cannot easily tell exactly where the person is looking, since your frame of reference and their frame of reference are not the same. Even if you superficially feel you are “looking right at the other person,” you are not, just as you do not receive true eye contact when watching your favorite star on television. Nor is the eye tracking of two callers synched in the same way that it might be face-to-face. (Having multiple callers only heightens these problems.) If you stare at the screen, it is difficult for the other party to tell if you are engaging with their eyes (provided the angle of your head signals some limited kind of attention) or gazing into space or past the countenance of the other person. In this regard, screen calls can be relatively impersonal.
So all other things being equal, online trust will be lower. Consequently, edgy interview questions are harder to pull off in these settings. As an interviewer, you are more likely to appear obnoxious, or overly pushy, or simply “off,” and in any case your intentions will be harder to read. So you may be forced to use fewer such questions or to blunt their hard edges. That is one reason online interviews tend to be less informative, and it is also a factor you need to respect when choosing your angle of approach.
That said, you can compensate for this greater difficulty. You can try to establish greater trust up front. You can deploy more bonding over common interests, or use self-deprecating humor more, if only to blunt your own harder edges later on. You can use more assuring rhetoric throughout the interview as a whole. All that takes time, and it can limit your own effectiveness; still, those approaches can give you greater leeway for pushing harder in other directions for more specific information.
It’s likely that the interviewee will find it harder to take risks in the online setting. When interviewed, often we start an anecdote or story and rely on implicit visual feedback to encourage or discourage us from proceeding further. But when most of that feedback is absent or delayed, we are less likely to go down that particular route to begin with. So interviewees will often be more boring, risk-averse, and homogenized, and as the interviewer, you will need to adjust your expectations accordingly.
To consider the information poverty problem more generally, when you use distance communications you are missing out on at least three distinct sources of knowledge: social presence, information richness, and the full synchronicity of back-and-forth. By social presence we mean your understanding of how the person interacts with others and projects a self-image. Information richness refers to the ability of the in-person interaction to indicate more about how a person walks, shakes your hand, greets others entering the room, and so on. And synchronicity concerns the rhythm and patter of your interactions, the nature of the pauses, the speed of the convergence of understanding, how well you coordinate on who is due to speak next, and so on.
For a particular interview, it is worth thinking through which of these you really need to make up for, and which you are willing to do without. Don’t just mentally compare Zoom to “real life”; rather, disaggregate and break down the exact problem you are facing. Missing out on social presence, for instance, is probably important if you are trying to hire a salesperson or a team leader. It could be less important if you are looking for someone who will telecommute and largely work solo, such as a writer or copy editor.
Very often, online interactions are fine for specific, focused discussions based around a concrete problem or issue or point of contention. They seem to function much less well as a way of generating spontaneous interaction or as a means of eliciting non-goal-specific information, and thus—compared to in-person interviewing—you don’t get a sense about things you would have never thought to ask about in the first place. If someone visits your office for a chat, they might note a common bond because of something in a photo, a piece of artwork, or a poster on the wall. That kind of observation is much less likely to happen over Zoom, both because the cue is less likely to be seen in the first place and also there is less “space” in the more focused conversation for raising it. So if that kind of background information is important for the job in question—for instance, by getting a sense of the broader social context a person is coming from—by all means compensate by asking about such matters directly.
By breaking down the deficiencies of online communication in this fashion, you get a better sense of how you might need to generate more information elsewhere. You could make up for the deficiencies of the online interview by asking a person more direct questions about the information-deficient area or adding questions when talking to references.
Online interviews also bring greater coordination problems when it comes to discerning whose turn it is to speak. Due to various technical glitches, there still may be delays in transmitting messages (perhaps some of those problems will be fixed by the time you are reading this; at the moment, about half of Tyler’s podcast guests have this problem at least once during the dialogue). Truly high-speed, uninterrupted internet access still is not the norm in the United States. Online conversations still often have short lags, or worse yet, the system can freeze up, if only temporarily. That harms the general flow of the conversation, even if a freeze or lag is not happening at a particular moment, because the discussants are never sure how their information is being transmitted, and they are never sure how well and how swiftly they are reading the signals of the other party to the conversation. There is a much greater disconnect—sometimes literally as well as figuratively—between the parties to these online interactions. Again, that is going to make a lot of interpersonal signals harder to read.
Another notable feature of online interaction is that it drains away many of the traditional markers of status.
Think of how many aspects of status relations are blurred or obliterated by the online setting. For instance, at a business meeting or interview there is typically a seating order of some kind, whether it is planned in advance or has arisen spontaneously. The boss or decision-maker is not usually pushed into the corner, for one thing. But with online calls, other than having a designated host who may “control the dials,” those status markers are largely absent. Furthermore, the person in control of the dials on the call often is a technical assistant, not the actual boss.
Many women have remarked on Twitter that they feel on more equal footing on a Zoom call. The (usually male) boss is not dominating the center of the room; he cannot so easily employ “me first” body language; it is harder to interrupt people; and the rotation of turns to speak is often more symmetric. So interviewers need to realize that they are not projecting leadership or charisma in the usual ways. Dress as a marker of status also plays a different role in online chats. Shirts, haircuts, and posture might matter more, but shoes, watches, gait, suits, and height all matter less. The notion of a commanding physical presence doesn’t play a big role. Handshakes may be on the way out anyway, but you certainly can’t do them through a Zoom call, so no one knows if yours is firm or weak. A lot of people used to coming across as high-status and charismatic in person will feel a bit lost through the screen. Witty repartee also can be hard to pull off over an internet call, and that too may diminish the stature of those individuals who are accustomed to using clever banter to command a room.
This all means you need to rethink how status relationships are projected in the online medium. Typically the online medium raises the influence and stature of people who can get to the point quickly. You should aim to do that anyway, but online that is all the more imperative. Many online professors report that for their longer scheduled sessions, they find it necessary to resort to Zoom breakout sessions to give the class some sense of control over their own education and thus to maintain the students’ involvement and interest. Over the longer term, those methods will reward non-paranoid leaders who are okay with giving up some sense of control in the moment, and you will need to adjust your style more in that direction, if you have not already.1
People who need to feel that they are coming across at their best fare worse in the environment of online presentation, because they just can’t do that well, and thus, they will become nervous, anxious, and feel inadequate. Those who are more oblivious to a sense of their own imperfections are more likely to have the upper hand. If you are easygoing and have a relatively secure sense of place in the world, you may end up coming across as higher status than the person who used to command the room through pushiness and signals of dominance.
It is striking that during the lockdowns traditional movie and television celebrities did not have access to their usual platforms. Many of them took to streaming personal content online, but as Spencer Kornhaber opined in The Atlantic, “celebrities have never been less entertaining.” They came across as bored and inept rather than relaxed and genuine. Most of these celebrities are used to context-created deference or even worship, but at the other end of an iPhone-created video they are just another mugging face, except they are less likely to realize that. So when Gal Gadot, Natalie Portman, Jamie Dornan, Sia, Pedro Pascal, Zoë Kravitz, Sarah Silverman, Leslie Odom Jr., Jimmy Fallon, Will Ferrell, Norah Jones, and Cara Delevingne created clips of themselves singing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” this was embarrassing rather than fascinating.2
Don’t be like these celebrities, no matter how much you are the boss face-to-face. Online interactions simply strip away a lot of your mystique, and you need to adjust accordingly.
One of the hardest mental adjustments for people to make is to realize how much their positive affect relies on their in-person projection of high social status. To give a simple example, you might not be as witty as you think! You will do better in the online call if you realize how much your in-person presence relies on a kind of phoniness, and allow your online charisma to be rebuilt on different grounds—those that are easier, more casual, more direct, and just plain charming (but in the modest rather than pushy sense of that word). So rather than treating that high status as something automatically conveyed by your suit and your place at the table, maybe now you, as an interviewer, will have to work harder for it. Treat that as a plus, and as a chance to learn something and to shine in a very personal and human way.
Another problem is this: if you are on “Zoom center stage” in the large box as the speaker, people have no choice but to look at you square on, unless they just aren’t paying attention. That can be stressful for you, because everyone can notice all of your imperfections, whether a pimple on your face, your unusual speech patterns, or your head movements. You too can see those same imperfections, and perhaps you too are not sure where you should be looking, and so you are torn between looking away in an effort to forget about it and glancing periodically at your own weirdness in order to try to correct it. Unfortunately, the watching crowd knows something a little strange is going on. When speaking live, experienced lecturers use all kinds of misdirection, including hand motions, body movements, and charisma, to cover up their blemishes, but on Zoom that is much harder to do.
Some individuals try to use their customized Zoom backgrounds to convey their importance, but this isn’t easy. Putting a skyscraper window view behind you is not good for the visual mechanics of the call—too much bright light—so maybe over time expensive works of art will come to play that role.
Overall, we’ve found that in the recent COVID-19 migration to the internet savannah, status symbols have changed from designer jackets to digital bitrate. High-powered investors and CEOs are spending thousands on studio-style cameras and lighting. Daniel has found that many of his Pioneers, on the other hand, are mimicking this style of status marking using clever software. Using green screens, voice-modifying software, and video filters, they are changing their appearance to make themselves look the part of an impressive founder, and doing it on a budget. This demonstrates not just impressive technical skills but also an interesting maturity. The fact that they care so much is a remarkable awareness of the perception of self by others, and none of this could have happened in a world of face-to-face interviews only. It is harder to send status signals online, but that in turn gives some people the chance to excel at that same task.
Tyler uses a David Burliuk sketch of books on a table for his Zoom background (Burliuk was a Ukrainian avant-garde artist from the early twentieth century), and if the camera tilts the right way you can see some classic Haitian art (Wilson Bigaud’s Night Market). Tyler is signaling openness, including openness to different cultures, plus a sense of the mysterious, encouraging you to probe more deeply into what he is doing. Daniel is flanked by a bright yellow background, identical to the color of his website, reflecting the Pioneer brand. It radiates “tech” rather than “culture.” There is not necessarily anything wrong with a candidate who has a mediocre background image, but still, it is one piece of information about that person’s self-presentation to the outside world—namely, that you are more likely to succeed with this match if you are hiring for a “substance job” than for a “flair job.”
Zoom calls can also provide collateral information about a person’s home and family life. Maybe that isn’t fair, but sometimes it is impossible to create a truly insulated environment for the online discussion. The phone can ring in the background, people may talk or yell, the dog might bark, and you may get a sense, however limited or vague, of the basic rhythms of family life in the house. And of course, you, as an interviewer, may be giving off comparable signals. Yes, sometimes you do have to get up to sign for a package from the UPS delivery person. The online chat breaks down the distinction between work space and home space; this is especially true if the parties are doing it during a pandemic, with everyone else at home, but it holds more generally too.
We view these as positive features of the online medium. We are not suggesting you take any kind of dogmatic stance as to what kind of home life is the right one to look for (should the dog’s bark be shrill and yapping? Deep and guttural? Who knows?). Still, this blurring of home and work life introduces variation in the basic interview structure, and that is a good thing, a bit like observing how the candidate interacts with the workers at Starbucks. Welcome any possible easing of tensions, ambiguity, or strangeness offered by the interview setting. Lean into it. Treat it as a surprise topic to talk about, to get the candidate out of interview mode and into conversational mode. But don’t start by prying into the person’s home life. Lead with something about your own situation, and then see how it all unfolds. Sometimes the home environment offers more chances for serendipity than does an office interview room, so take advantage of that.
Along these lines, Tyler has found that teaching online, through Zoom, has given his students the feeling of “being invited into his home.” His wife, Natasha, has walked over to the screen to wave to them; they see his sofa; and once or twice he has stood up to get a bottle of water from the refrigerator. Those are all small touches, but overall the feeling is a more egalitarian one. At least for his graduate students, that brings them further along the path of thinking of themselves as his peers—which they should aspire to be—rather than as drone-like students with homework due. Daniel, on his Zoom calls and seminars, typically is wearing a T-shirt. Silicon Valley was casual in the first place, but now it is easier than ever to bring the casual standards of the home into the workplace, as those two venues are increasingly one and the same.3
Many celebrities, when they began doing online interviews from home during lockdown, had bookshelves behind them, though we are not sure how much of this was design and how much was accident. Cate Blanchett, in her background, had Postcapitalism, by Paul Mason, and also the Oxford English Dictionary, both making her appear intellectual. In the background for Prince Charles was a book called Stubbs, by Basil Taylor, referring to the eighteenth-century English painter well-known for his portraits of horses. That volume would not suit Daniel or Tyler, but for Prince Charles it seems about right. One journalistic study of British members of Parliament found they were likely to cover up their bookcases and make their backgrounds bland and nondescript, perhaps out of fear that voters offended by visible book titles would be a bigger problem than any possible upside from showing off one’s reading prowess. Nabokov’s Lolita is a deeply subtle novel, but do you really want your constituents to see it in your home?4
While we enjoy the more egalitarian features of online interviews and interactions, we realize that new forms of status hierarchy are emerging in our own online interviews, and not just because of how the Pioneers program their software backgrounds. The more stripped-down the online environment, the more important the individual performance itself, in particular the answers to interview questions. These online interviews are a bit like online speed chess, where all that matters is the quality of the moves—in this case, it’s the quality of the answers. If the fanciness of your shoes or cuff links matters less, the fluidity of your banter matters more. That may be a better signal of intellectual merit, but still, you as an interviewer need to realize you are receiving a very limited set of signals; you should not be too entranced by the smooth talkers, and you need to set your epistemic humility awareness on high.
Finally, Zoom and other online calls may penalize those individuals who are prone to suffer from “Zoom fatigue.” As we’ve seen, when you are participating in a Zoom call or other online encounter, you don’t have access to all of the social information you are accustomed to, such as many hand gestures and body movements. Instead, you are supposed to concentrate on the words being said, and indeed, you don’t have too many other options (other than just being distracted and inattentive, of course). But many people thrive on interpreting social signals from body language and broader demeanor, and on mirroring those same signals back—if your interlocutor smiles, you smile too. The scientific evidence suggests that many of us—perhaps most of us—find it disorienting to be cut off from so many of the usual social signals and forced to focus on only a few markers of the communicative experience. So if the person you are talking to seems a little “out of it,” don’t be too quick to infer they are inattentive more generally. Zoom calls may penalize the extroverts among us to a disproportionate degree, and yet for some jobs those extroverts may be the people you are looking to hire. If you are trying to hire a “cold call” salesperson who will go around knocking on doors, put less weight on the Zoom call than if you are trying to hire a programmer.5
One of Daniel’s suggestions to avoid Zoom fatigue is simply to shut off the video and just use the audio, like a phone call. Many times the video is misleading anyway, and phone calls can be more intimate than video calls. Furthermore, this decision may prevent you from getting sick of Zoom and other video calls altogether, assuming there will be cases when you need to use them whether you wish to or not. When it comes to talking heads, sometimes it is better just to say no.6
In a Catholic church’s confessional, the priest and the confessee are separated by a partition. There is no eye contact or chance of eye contact—unlike a Zoom call. Yet this setting seems to have useful features. Earlier in history, Catholic confession was performed in public; the “dark box” method did not come into use until the mid-sixteenth century. But the dark box method proved useful, and it spread through the church over the course of centuries. It seemed to make people more willing to confess.7
Arguably public confession is making a comeback in our “cancel culture,” especially on social media, but it seems that making confession a public practice induces too much performativity and falseness rather than being uniquely suited to producing truth. That, again, suggests some reasons that less direct contact and less visibility might sometimes be better at eliciting truth.
The classical approach to psychotherapy also makes a point of deliberately avoiding a direct face-to-face interaction: the patient lies on a couch and does not look the therapist directly in the eye while speaking. To be clear, this is only one option for therapy—people who see therapists in person often do so face-to-face, and there is a good deal of therapy by Skype and Zoom these days—but many people still take the time, trouble, and expense to go to the office of a psychotherapist just so they can lie down and rather decidedly look the other way. It’s yet another case of a time-honored practice where individuals are not pursuing the maximum degree of face-to-face contact, and we can learn from that.
One common element in the confessional and therapeutic settings is that a lack of eye-to-eye contact can be used to stimulate or ease confession, or at least an opening up. If the priest were staring the confessee right in the eye, it might be harder for the confessee to admit to having failed to fulfill one’s family responsibilities. Furthermore, anonymity would be broken. Similarly, in psychotherapy, it might be easier for the patient to relate a childhood trauma when no one is offering a direct, visually available response (“Did he raise his eyebrow at that? Or sneer, or laugh?”). Eye contact can be a bond, but it can also be a threat, or a source of undue or distracting focus, and it makes it harder for many people to relax or open up. In the therapeutic setting, opinions differ on the effectiveness of the couch, but it may aid free association and the pacing of the session and make the overall environment less threatening.8
The lack of eye-to-eye contact also means that the mutual reassurance mode is probably weaker in an online call. There is less implicit pressure to be polite, or to smile, or to look for acknowledgment and approval by the other person. At least sometimes, the removal of that conformity-inducing information can give us the opportunity to probe a little more deeply. And you can learn something about how the interviewee carries him- or herself when social trust is not entirely present or is not continually being confirmed by the cues of direct social presence.
Some anecdotes from lockdown-inspired methods of online dating support this possibility that people may open up more in a more stripped-down environment. Consider twenty-seven-year-old Judy Kwon, a Brooklynite. She expressed an important sentiment about the potential upside of online dating: “There are obviously a lot of drawbacks to this, but at least for me, this [scenario] has prompted more serious conversations.… I’ve been more vocal about how I feel, and I’ve asked him [the dating partner] to do the same, because we can’t read each other the same way you would when you’re getting to know someone in-person. It’s made us more in touch with our feelings, for sure.”9
It is both an advantage and disadvantage of the Zoom date that there are fewer ways of filling awkward pauses. You cannot easily pick up the pitcher of water on the restaurant table and pour to create a distraction or to fill time. So what do people—at least some people—do? They speak directly and start baring their souls. And this can lead two people to get to know each other more quickly and more deeply—at least if the date doesn’t just collapse right away into boring awkwardness.10
When it comes to interviews, it may sound crazy to prefer less rather than more contact with the interviewee, but if you ever have enjoyed a “walking interview,” where direct eye contact typically is minimal, you should not find these claims so strange. A walking interview can be more useful and more revelatory than a face-to-face, across-the-table interview. There is somehow more room to explore tangential ideas, and a broader penumbra for topics and the sequencing of a discussion. Being side by side can create feelings of mutuality, safety, and even playfulness. Perhaps some conversants feel less “liable” for what they are saying, compared to a chat across a desk or small table.
Media interviewer Terry Gross, who has worked for National Public Radio, deliberately uses a distance technique that is not direct and face-to-face: “While guests sit in a remote studio, Gross sits in her ‘little box’ at WHYY in Philadelphia—a setup that provides a kind of faceless intimacy not unlike that of confession or psychoanalysis, where the patient and practitioner face away from each other, under the theory that the obscurity will allow thoughts and fantasies to flow more freely. Perhaps that is what lures her guests into such a revealing mode.”11
In yet other settings, distance can provide a path toward openness. During the lockdown, researchers conducting telephone surveys have found that respondents have been more willing to pick up the phone and indeed to converse with the interviewer. Many respondents not only answered the survey questions but confided in the interviewer about their fears, their sadness, and how they were faring during the pandemic. Those conversations may have served as a safety valve of sorts, and it seems that many people found the faceless phone interviewer to be a sort of confidant. In one data set, a series of interviews that used to average ten minutes took fourteen minutes during the pandemic because the respondents were chattier than usual.12
With all that in mind, one possible strategy for online interviewing is to try asking a question or two that evokes a sense of confession. Don’t make this a challenging or sharp question; rather, present it passively and openly, as if you are there to listen, not to judge. How about this?
Or try this one:
Note that the invocation of the co-worker makes the inquiry less threatening and is more likely to induce an honest response. If you wish to go direct, you might try:
In a face-to-face interview, the interviewee might feel too inhibited to serve up a useful answer. But online, if you feel you stand a chance of eliciting a “true confession,” so to speak, these are worth a try. That said, if you receive a truly revealing answer, take it as information, not as a sign that the person is dysfunctional and falling apart. It is you who made the effort to draw out this information, and if the answer is more explicit than usual in some manner, remember that you sought it out. Adjust your expectations accordingly and try to see the positive in it. Such an answer is, in part, a reflection of your success as an interviewer, not necessarily a defect of the interviewee.
Note also that in some cases, especially those involving younger women and male interviewers, lack of direct eye contact may facilitate trust. Eye contact also can be a threat or a reminder of previous unpleasant situations, possibly involving harassment. This is yet another illustration of how the online medium simply is different rather than lacking or inferior in every regard.
Of course, if you are being interviewed, you may wish to protect against being too casual and open. Some Zoom daters have expressed that they feel a sense of comfort in the ritual of “a workout, a shower, and some date-worthy clothes” before going on an online date. Others have made a point to put on their best cologne or perfume and even to make their bed (just in case they get lucky?). Along similar lines, we think many individuals, to maintain proper levels of concentration, should dress and prepare as if it were a real face-to-face interview. So if you otherwise come across as not sufficiently disciplined, consider putting on your dress shoes for that Zoom call. But note: we do not recommend this for the more casual world of tech and venture capital interviews. Again, you wish to match your style of presentation to the worldview of your interviewers, and you should choose your mode of presentation accordingly.13
The sooner you realize that online interviews operate in an intrinsically different medium than face-to-face interactions, the better. You will know that your older standards for recognizing talent in the face-to-face interview need to be modified. Technological advances will not change that basic difference.
You should avoid the trap of thinking that the distance interviewing technology simply has to be “good enough.” Maybe someday we will have a form of holographic virtual reality that approaches a perfect simulation of face-to-face interaction, but in the meantime, evolutions in online technologies are not simply better approximations of face-to-face interactions. Instead, they skew our attention in certain directions rather than others. Technologies do not improve along all dimensions at once (e.g., Viagra came before an Alzheimer’s cure, so life extension for some people’s body parts works better than for others), and future improvements we will see in online communications will have biased impacts on our perceptions. For instance, finer resolution on screens may boost information transmission without doing much for social presence. Yes, the new technology will be “better” in an objective sense. But if you don’t realize that your assessments now may include more impressions based on the greater number of pixels and not more impressions based on social presence, you can be led astray. Again, it is a mistake to think that the purpose of distance communications is to approximate “being there.”14
Alternatively, imagine that Oculus technologies develop very rapidly and that your virtual “Paris holiday” is almost as good as the real thing, except cheaper and more convenient. Your virtual-reality interview through Oculus still won’t have the same emotional resonance as would a face-to-face interaction. If nothing else, your virtual interaction won’t have the potential inconveniences of the face-to-face encounter. Your avatar likely is programmed never to stumble or spill the coffee, there is no question of being late for the appointment because of traffic, and the skill of reading a virtual three-dimensional room probably won’t be exactly the same as negotiating the “real world.” It is possible that in advanced virtual reality, everyone will seem just a bit too antiseptic. It is hard to give advice for a technology that is not yet mature, but when it does become mainstream, you will have to figure out how to compensate for those differences, no matter which side of the interview you are on. Just don’t confuse that new technology with face-to-face reality.
To be futuristic again for a moment, imagine a future where online interviewing offers much more informational richness than face-to-face interviewing. You might imagine, for instance, that you can use AI to monitor the online interview and give you running commentary on how the person is doing, what kind of personality they have, and which questions you should ask next. Furthermore, it might be harder and more awkward to use such a technology during a face-to-face interview, if only because you could not so easily look down all the time to see what the AI device is telling you. It is also possible that, in the future, an online interaction offers better “personal presence” information than does a face-to-face interview. That may sound impossible virtually by definition, but keep in mind human heterogeneity. You have a particular experience of personal presence in an interview, but you don’t know how others would have responded to the same interactions. It may be easier for machine intelligence to break down the online interview and report to you how the interviewee “performed” in terms of personal presence for typical others, not just for yourself. Again, we could find ourselves in the unusual situation of the face-to-face interview being the relatively more deficient mode of communication.
Yet even in this supposedly ideal situation, the AI-based interviews will introduce biases in your evaluations. In particular, such technologies would divert your attention toward what the AI can measure well and distract you from the noisier pieces of information. And if many institutions have access to the same AI technologies, as is likely to be the case, it may be precisely the idiosyncratic, noisy pieces of information that become the most important for you. Keep in mind that everyone is looking for talent, and you need to spot the talent that your competitors cannot. It is not obvious how much AI would help you in that quest if it was generally available, and in some regards it might make your task harder because it would make it easier for others to spot the same otherwise undervalued job candidates you’re looking for.
Finally, keep in mind that face-to-face interactions can distract you from making the right interview decisions. Not all interview cues are the right ones. Over Zoom you have less of a sense of how the person dresses (shoes, anyone?), not much sense of how the person reacts to others entering the room, and no sense of how the person smells, among other missing pieces of information. We don’t know which of those are valuable for making good hiring decisions (it is possible none of them are), and we may misinterpret cues in those areas even if in principle they might be properly informative. So again, don’t go into online interactions with a defeatist attitude—in some cases such interviews may save you from being your own worst enemy. The online dialogue at least offers some chance of greater focus on the information that really matters.
Individuals will work pretty hard to obscure their true level of conscientiousness. In fact, they might be fooling the interviewer most of the time, because who wants to appear non-conscientious in an interview? Most interviewers consider a person’s gait, microexpressions, and interactions with third parties when judging how trustworthy that person really is, whether those judgments are fair or not. And we don’t know how accurate those signals really are. So if the online interview equalizes those signals across candidates somewhat, you may end up making a better decision. You may have to look more closely at what a person has done, and as you will see later, we are big fans of “demonstrated preference”—actual life activities and achievements—as the most reliable source of information about an individual.
The supposed information poverty of the online interview also may help some interviewers overcome potential biases against women and also some minority groups. We’ve already mentioned that the online world makes it harder for you to pick up on traditional cues of charisma and social presence, but for many jobs charisma and social presence can be misleading indicators. In particular, understandings of charisma vary across cultures. We have often found that individuals from non-Western cultures are what we perceive as “excessively” respectful when being interviewed (both online and otherwise), perhaps falling back on politeness because they are aware they don’t have in-depth knowledge of the cultural world they are suddenly dealing with and are afraid of making mistakes (see Chapter 8, on gender and race). There is nothing wrong with politeness, to say the least, but it will be hard to judge the charisma of an individual who takes this approach. As a result, you, as an interviewer from a Western culture, may be tempted to conclude that such individuals are not very charismatic, but of course, that is a mistake—the person is simply afraid to display their charisma for you. The online interview, by making everyone less charismatic, may help counter your bias against these individuals. Once again, it is all about learning how to turn the online medium to your advantage.