Some analysis of evaluation score of job interview frompsychological point of view
Kazumasa MORI1, Mika KAWAI2 and Tomoko OE3

1Member of SGB, Professor, Dept. of Business Adminstration, Bunkyo University(Address 121-8577,5-6-1, Hanahata, Adachi-ku, Tokyo, Japan)
E-mail: morik@bunkyo.ac.jp
2Member of SGB, Dept. of Business Adminstration, Meisei University(Address 191-8506, 2-1-1, Kubo, Hino City, Tokyo, Japan)
3Non-Member of SGB, Department of Literature, Teikyo University(Address 192-0395,359, Ohtsuka, Hachiouzi City, Tokyo, Japan)

In this study, we evaluated the relationship between intuitive scoring for job applications and psychological characteristics of applicants. More precisely, we used intuitive scoring on interview selection and the
Vocational Indecision Scale to ascertain the psychological state of 21 university students in terms of job
preparation. We also measured the students’ Big Five personality traits using the Japanese version of the
Ten-Item Personality Inventory. Additionally, we analyzed the relationship between the intuitive score,
psychological state of job preparation, and the Big Five personality traits. Our results show a relationshipbetween intuitive evaluation and psychological state of job preparation, indicating that applicants who are
eligible to be hired are also in a suitable psychological state for job application. Furthermore, the personality
trait of conscientiousness affects the evaluation of human resources staff in a company.
Key Words : Job interview, Human resource, Intuitive selection, Big Five personality traits.

1. INTRODUCTION

between intuitive score and the Ten-Item Personality
Inventory based on the Big Five personality theory(Tupes & Christal, 1961; John & Srivastava, 1999).
The Big Five personality theory (BFPT) is a model
based on common language descriptors of personality. In this theory, the human personality is divided
into five traits: Openness to Experience (O), Conscientiousness (C), Extraversion (E), Agreeableness(A), and Neuroticism (N). These traits are stable
across cultures (McCrae and Costa, 1997). Relationships between BFPT results and personality disorders(Clark, 2007), anxiety disorders (Kessler at al. 2005),
and some social activities have been established. Although the best-known BFPT scale is the Revised
NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R, Costa &McCrae, 1985), it is too long to measure in concert
with other psychological scales. To solve this problem, Gosling et al. (2003) developed shorter scales
for the BFPT, the Ten-Item Personality Inventory(TIPI). TIPI consists of ten questionnaires which iseasy to use when we examine the Big Five traits withother scales like the IRS tendency scale. We therefore
used the Japanese version of TIPI in the current
study.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows:
The experiment design and basic results are presented in Section 2, the analysis results in Section 3,
and the conclusion and discussion in Section 4.

In this study, we evaluated the relationship between intuitive scoring for job applications and psychological characteristics of applicants. More precisely, we used intuitive scoring for interview selection (Kahneman, 2011; Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier,2011) and the Vocational Indecision Scale (VIS,
Shimoyama, 1986) to measure the psychologicalstate of 21 university students for job preparation. We
also measured the Big Five personality traits of thestudents using the Japanese version of the Ten-Item
Personality Inventory (Gosling et al., 2003; Oshio atal., 2012). Additionally, we analyze the relationshipbetween the intuitive score, psychological state forjob preparation, and the Big Five personality traits(Tupes & Christal, 1961; John & Srivastava, 1999).
Intuitive scoring is a type of evaluation method
used during interview selection to assess applicants’abilities. Although intuitive scoring is often used incompany entrance examinations, its validity has seldom been evaluated. Similarly, the relationship between intuitive scoring and characteristics like personality traits have not been assessed in depth. In thisstudy, we evaluated the validity of intuitive scoresand examined the relationship between intuitivescores and personality traits.
As mentioned before, we examine the relationship12. EXPERIMENT DESIGN AND BASIC
RESULTStions represent scale sum scores for Openness to Experience (O), Conscientiousness (C), Extraversion(E), Agreeableness (A), and Neuroticism (N). We did
not find specific or abnormal values in these statistics. The basic statistics for the intuitive scores andthe VIS scale are shown in Table 2.

(1) Participants
A total of 21 business major undergraduates at a private university in Japan participated in this study.
The participants’ age ranged from 21-22 years, andall of them have started job hunting. They could understand and use Japanese in this study. They did notreceive any compensation for participating in this research.

3. MAIN RESULTS OF ANALYSIS(1) Analysis 1:Degree of coincidence of the evaluation
In analysis 1, we caluculate degree of coincidenceof evaluations by two human resources staff. As theyscored two questionnaires (reason for application andself-introducition), we caluculate correlation coeffecients of their evaluation for each quastionnaries.
By the results that are shown in Table 3, we foundthat two evaluations by human resource staff had
moderate correlation and coucluded that their evaluation were almost coincided.

(2) Experiment designa) Questionnaires
At the beginning of the experiment, we sent out twoquestionnaires to the participants. In these, we asked
about their reason for application and self-introduction to the company of their first choice.
b) The Ten-Item Personality Inventory
We measured the participants’ personality traits using . As all the participants were fluent in Japanese,
we used the Japanese version of the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI-J, Oshio at al., 2012). The TIPIJ is administered with a three-point scale, in accordance with the original studies.

(2) Analysis 2: Relationship between the intuitivescores and the psychological scale for job preparation
In Analysis 2, we evaluated the relationship between
intuitive scores and psychological scale for job preparation. First, we calculated the sum of each intuitivescores (reason for job application and self-introduction). Then, we also calculated the sum scores of the
VIS scale. Finally, we evaluated correlation coefficients between the sum scores of intuitive scores and
VIS sum scores. Table 4 contains the correlation coefficients. We found the VIS and intuitive scores toc) The Vocational Indecision Scale
We also measured the psychological state of participants for job preparation. We used the Vocational
Indecision Scale (VIS, Shimoyama, 1986). The VIS
is a psychological scale for job preparation comprising 38 items and administered with a seven-point
scale.

Table 1 Basic TIPI-J statisticsd) Intuitive scores
Two human resources staff members of a venturecompany intuitively scored the two questionnaires
providing the reason for application and self-introduction. Scoring is done on the basis of the desirability of the candidate. The intuitive score is administered with a five-point scale.

MEAN
SD

O
4.167
1.176

C
2.929
1.443

E
3.643
1.582

A
4.929
1.143

N
4.357
1.442

Table 2 Basic statistics for intuitive scores and the VIS
score
Intuitive scores
VIS
Reason for applicaSelf-introduction
tion
score
MEA
78.42
N
2.738
2.905
9
SD
0.752
0.605
7.646

(3) Data analysis
A combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches was used in the data analysis which was
conducted with respect to the objective set for thisstudy. All analyses were carried out using R version
3.3.

Table 3 Correlation coeffecients of evaluation for two questionnaries
Reason for(4) Basic results
From the scales denoted in subsection 2 (2), we calculated scale sum scores for each element. The basic
statistics for scale sum scores in the TIPI-J are shownin Table 1. As mentioned earlier, the table abbrevia-

application

Self-introduction

0.421*

0.452*

Correlation
coeffeciants

2the reason for job application have middle correlation, that is statistically significant.
We conclude that a certain relationship exists between intuitive evaluation of the reason for job application and psychological state for job preparation.
(3) Analysis 3: Differences on the psychologicalscale for job preparation between employed and unemployed groups
In Analysis 3, we considered a scenario moreclosely resembling real job application. First, we calculated the sum scores of each intuitive score (reason
for job application and self-introduction). Then, after
which we classified the participants into high- andlow-score groups, according to their sum scores,
which corresponded to employed and unemployedgroups, respectively. Finally, we compared the meanof each score group’s VIS.
Figure1 1 depicts the result of the comparison of themean scores, grouped by the reason for application
score. We found statistical significance between theemployed and unemployed groups (t(19)=3.35,p<0.01). In contrast, in terms of the comparison of the mean scores grouped by self-introduction
scores (Figure 2), we did not find statistical significance. These results indicate that the reason for job
application score can predict the VIS score. Note thaton the VIS score, a higher score means better preparation for job application.
We conclude that students who are well-prepared forjob application can express valid reasons for their application, increasing their chances to be hired.

Figure 2 Comparison of mean VIS score and grouped selfintroduction score(4) Analysis 4: The Big Five traits as a factor affecting the intuitive score

In Analysis 4, we investigated whether the Big
Five traits affect the intuitive score. We calculated correlation coefficients between the intuitive scores (reason for application and self-introduction) and the TIPI-J score.
Table 5 shows the correlation coefficients between the intuitive and TIPI-J scores. We foundthat self-introduction and conscientiousness
scores have a medium statistically significant
correlation (p=0.048). We also found that reason
for job application and the conscientiousness
score have middle correlation that is marginallysignificant and that reason for job application
score and the extraversion score have middle
correlation that is marginally significant.
We conclude that the conscientiousness score ismainly related to the intuitive scores of job application.

Table 4 Correlation coefficients between the VIS and the intuitive scores
Reason for job appli-

VISScorecationSelf-introduction

0.443*

0.069

Figure 3 Comparison of mean VIS score grouped by conscientiousness scores

Figure 1 Comparison of mean VIS score and grouped reason for application score3(5) Analysis 5: Do the Big-Five traits predict thepsychological scale for job preparation?

ratings for preparedness, prize such applicants.
This tendency for the conscientiousness personality may be specific to Japan, and future studies
need to evaluate the role of conscientiousness inother countries and contexts.
In Analysis 5 we found that the personality traits
established using the TIPI-J could not predict thepsychological state for job preparation as per the
VIS. Mori et al. (2019) similarly found that personality traits could not classify future academic
achievement. From the results of Analyses 4 and
5 we conclude that personality traits are not directly related to participants’ achievements, although they do affect the intuitive evaluation ofother people.

In Analysis 5, we investigated whether the Big
Five traits predicted VIS score. As we found that
the TIPI-J conscientiousness score is related tothe intuitive score that predicts the VIS score, we
focused on the conscientiousness score in thisanalysis. We classified participants into highand low-score groups, based on their conscientiousness scores. Then, we compared the mean
VIS score of the two groups. Figure 3 depicts thecomparison of mean score grouped by conscientiousness scores. We found no statistical significance between the two groups. We conclude thatthe Big-Five traits cannot predict the psychological state for job preparation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: This work was supported
by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 20K03157.

3. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION
In this study, we evaluated the relationship between intuitive scoring of job applications andpsychological characteristics of applicants.
From the Analysis 2 and 3 in Section 3, we foundthat the intuitive evaluation and psychologicalstate for job preparation display a certain relationship and that suitable applicants are in good
psychological state for job application, which
can be measured by the VIS. These results areuseful when for the training of applicants, as we
can evaluate participants’ chance of being hiredby determining their VIS scores. On the other
hand, our latest study showed that intuitive scoring for application did not classify future results.
From this result and results of this study, we conclude that intuitive scoring for reason for application cannot predict respondents’ futureachievements, but instead indicate past accumulation.
We examined applicants personality traits inAnalysis 4, using the TIPI-J. We found that intuitive scoring mainly relates to conscientiousness,
and we conclude that conscientiousness personality trait affects the evaluation of a company’s
human resources staff. This result is consistent
with results of existing research. For example,
Komarraju et al. (2019) also showed conscientiousness personality trait predict GPA and examination performance. As the conscientiousness personality trait is a tendency to display
self-discipline, applicants with high conscientiousness scores tend to prepare well. Thus, Japanese evaluators, who generally provide good

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