Thomas Edison gave applicants a 150-question test. Most college graduates failed it.
Before the twentieth century, most hiring happened through personal connections, family networks, or direct observation of a worker’s skill. The formal job interview emerged alongside the growth of large corporations in the early 1900s, when organizations became too large for managers to personally know every applicant.1
Thomas Edison was among the first prominent employers to systematize candidate evaluation. In 1921, he developed a questionnaire of approximately 150 questions covering history, geography, science, and general knowledge, which he administered to applicants at his West Orange laboratory. When news of the test leaked to the press, journalists and college graduates attempted it. Most failed.2
The structured interview, with predetermined questions asked of all candidates, developed in the mid-twentieth century as industrial psychologists studied what actually predicted job performance. Research consistently found that unstructured interviews, where the interviewer improvised questions, were poor predictors of future performance.3
A 1998 meta-analysis by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter found that unstructured interviews had a validity coefficient of 0.38 for predicting job performance, while structured interviews reached 0.51.4 Neither figure is high. The ritual that determines who gets hired and who does not remains one of the least reliable tools in organizational psychology, and one of the most trusted.