Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/250460 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 14799
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Interviewing is a decisive stage of most processes that match candidates to firms or organizations. This paper studies how and why the interview assessment of a candidate depends on the other candidates seen by the same evaluator. We leverage novel administrative data covering about 29,000 one-to-one interviews from a study grant admission process where candidates are quasi-randomly assigned to evaluators and time slots. We find that a candidate's assessment decreases in the quality of the other candidates seen by the same evaluator, and most strikingly in the quality of the previous candidate. This effect is strongest when candidates are similar in terms of their observable characteristics. The reduced-form patterns and the results of a structural estimation suggest that evaluators exhibit a contrast effect which is caused by the interplay between the associative recall of prior candidates and the attention to salient quality differences.
Subjects: 
interviewing
associative recall
contrast effect
JEL: 
D91
M51
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
3.25 MB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.