Psychology Commons^™

Enhancing Consistency Of Maximal Responding In Behavior Description Interviews: An Exploration Of Priming And Response Length, Allen I. Huffcutt, Satoris S. Howes, Dianne D. Murphy, Sara A. Murphy

Personnel Assessment and Decisions

In a Behavior Description Interview (BDI), candidates are asked to describe past experiences that demonstrate skills and abilities important for the position (Janz, 1982). A recent study by Huffcutt et al. (2020) found that only around half of participants (48.1 percent) describe an experience reflecting maximal performance capability. Random mixing of maximal capability with day-to-day typical performance tendencies is problematic psychometrically because candidates are not all providing comparable information and top candidates could be overlooked. Given notable methodological concerns with Huffcutt et al.’s approach, our first purpose was to provide empirical confirmation that maximal responding in BDIs is, in fact, …