ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the history with special emphasis on recent research findings. Fortunately, our task is made more manageable by the efforts of earlier reviewers who have periodically provided comprehensive reviews of the employment interview. The comprehensive review of the research on the employment interview was published by Wagner in 1949. Wright and later Schmitt summarized many research studies of decision-making processes of the employment interview. The review by Schmitt was comprehensive and is illustrative of the kinds of variables and processes investigated in exploring the employment interview during the past ten years or so. In short, the mainstream of research dealing with the employment interview has typically been without the benefit of more broadly applicable person-perception models. Industrial and organizational psychologists have been studying this process for more sixty years in an effort to determine the reliability and validity of these perceptual judgments and also to discover the various psychological variables which influence these judgments.
