| Extending it to interviews doesn't work partly because the findings are so unsurprising. Permitting "I don't know" doesn't actually seem to help candidates get more correct answers in the study
(looking at the actual paper, the group discouraged from saying "I don't know" actually got a slightly higher number of questions right at the first time of asking) It simply means those encouraged to say "I don't know" guess wrongly fewer times - no surprises there - whilst still revealing their ignorance to the interviewer. Applied to job interviews: interviewing people for a job by asking simple factual questions the interviewer knows the answer to is doing it wrong. If they're indiscriminately negatively marking "wrong" answers that aren't prefaced with an explanation that guessing is inadvisable, they're doing it even more wrong - how candidates answer questions they don't know is valuable decision making heuristic. A more usual interview will involve many questions where
there is no clear "correct" answer, in which case "I don't know" will usually be one of the worst possible answers. Even where the questions are fact-based, a decent interviewer should usually give more credit for how a person guesses than an admission of ignorance, in which case "I don't know" is neutral at best. Sure, some candidates that aren't good at guessing or are especially bad at bullshitting will appear worse than if they're encouraged to say "I don't know", but that's valuable information for the interviewer which lost by encouraging everyone to give a non-answer. Same applies if humility is a key requirement and "I don't know" actually is a decent answer. TLDR: Since correct answers are unaffected, allowing candidates to say "I don't know" only improves the interview performance of weak candidates. |