Professor Christian Wright is a professor of psychology at San Francisco State University. He holds a phD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the University of South Florida. His research explores human resources selection tools, including interviews, written assessments, and personality tests, with an emphasis on how job applicants manipulate responses on recruitment tests. This interview took place in November 2024. Interviewed by Isabel Chen and Sophie Niu.
Chen: What got you into Industrial and Organizational Psychology?
Wright: I did not enter college as a psychology major. I was originally going to major in business or communications, until I took general psych as a freshman in college with about 450 other students. I fell in love with it, and I found it was the only class that I was taking where I was reading the book and engaging with the material even when I didn’t need to. I was fascinated by the science of psychology and how we try to understand and explain human behavior.
So why I/O psych? The undergraduate institution I attended within the University of South Florida in Tampa has a well-regarded I/O phD program. At the undergraduate level, I was able to explore the subject through my courses and interaction with faculty. I was a big fan of social psychology, so I applied to both social psych and I/O psychology programs out of undergrad because they’re very similar. I came to understand that industrial/organizational psych incorporates a lot of social psychology, and so when it came time to choose, I went the I/O route.
I thought an I/O degree would position me to pursue roles where I could make a significant impact. Also, there was just a lot more opportunity, particularly to work in a nonacademic setting, with a doctorate in I/O.
Chen: That’s very interesting. Can you briefly describe the premise of your research?
Wright: Yes, absolutely. Before coming to San Francisco State, I was a consultant. I worked in the industry for about 10 years, and accrued a lot of practical experience, most of which was in employee selection. When I came to San Francisco State in 2003, I focused my research on this niche. How do we approach the hiring process? How do we recognize the best applicants? And, after we hire them, how do we ensure that they stay with the organization? In summary, my research interests are in employee selection and retention. How do we get folks; and then, how do we incentivize our best talent to stay?
Chen: I was interested in the ways psychology overlaps with industry. Can you elaborate on your research about employee recruitment?
Wright: Since I’ve been at San Francisco State, my focus has been on the different techniques that organizations use to hire folks. I focused especially on the interview portion of recruitment, which is important for several reasons. Firstly, the interview is ubiquitous. It’s very rare to get a job and not have an interview as part of the application process. I’ve always been fascinated by how organizations utilize the interview. It can be as effective as it can be ineffective. My most recent publication focuses on identifying specific workplace-relevant characteristics through the interview process.
In recent years, instead of focusing on the positive characteristics of its prospective employees, employers have reversed course. Our most current paper evaluates how companies use the interview process to identify folks who have the tendency to be narcissistic, uncooperative, and discordant. It’s a fascinating change.
Chen: You mentioned that you like to focus on the interview process. What did you find interesting about interview behavior, and the types of questions employers typically ask?
Wright: It varies widely. Interviews, in their diverse forms, can be extremely unstructured conversations or heavily structured, behavior-oriented inquiries. What I find interesting are the differing dynamics that play into and impact the interview process. For instance, who’s doing the interviewing? What information do they have about the applicants? Having access to resume information, knowing where someone went to school, can prime the interviewer in a specific direction. In that way, the demographic characteristics of both the interviewer and the interviewee, what competencies or characteristics the interviewer focuses on, all generally tend to affect the outcome and discourse of the interview.
When I used to work in recruitment, I encouraged employers to focus on behavioral and situational questions that are specifically related to the workplace. Instead of asking, where do you see yourself in five years, or what are your interests, it is more pertinent to prompt people with specific behavioral examples that presumably link to workplace behavior. For example, Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a coworker? What was the conflict? What led up to it? What was the outcome?
Niu: I read your paper on attracting high-resilience workers. Do you believe that resilience should always be a key focus in recruitment?
Wright: That’s an excellent question. It is an important characteristic. Typically, we try to match the competencies and the characteristics that are necessary to the organization and to the role. So although you would assume that being resilient would be an important characteristic for most jobs, there may exist roles where it’s not so important.
Typically, instead of sitting down with an employer and unilaterally suggesting five characteristics that they should search for in an employee, we encourage discourse on the role and its expectations. We sit down with the recruitment team and invite them to talk to us about their organization and about the job posting. What will this person be doing? What do the daily tasks entail? Who do they have to interact with? What are the positive and negative aspects of the job? Then, from that, we are able to assess the competencies or characteristics that we can measure candidates by—whether it be resilience, conscientiousness, or communication skills.
Niu: Do you think there are other traits that might be equally, if not more important?
Wright: It’s an important question; what does the research say about the general characteristics that most jobs value? The answers would emphasize some form of cognition, whether it’s the ability to think critically, a person’s processing speed, their conscientiousness, dependability, etc. Additionally, skills that employers ubiquitously tend to value include communication, both oral and in writing, and the ability to interact effectively with other people, whether it be clients or peers. Those are some of the big ones. Beyond that, it’s kind of job-dependent.
Niu: How do you envision improving current recruitment tests to encourage greater resilience in candidates?
Wright: In terms of attracting resilient folks, one thing that has been proven effective is what we call a realistic job preview. Giving applicants a realistic sense of the job, both the good and the bad aspects, can encourage resilience. It can help with priming folks in areas where they might need to be more resourceful, allowing them to self-select. Post-recruitment, with onboarding or early training, you can always engage in training activities to build employee resilience.
Niu: You’ve spoken before about how job previews can negatively portray and thereby discourage employees from pursuing high-trauma jobs. Can you talk more about that?
Wright: For certain jobs, especially in healthcare, the realistic job preview might place emphasis on unattractive aspects of the role. For many jobs, such as an emergency room physician, or a CPS worker, or a 9-1-1 operator, people might have a different conception of what the job entails, but may alter course when presented with further insight. Information provided to folks can help them reassess whether or not it’s a position they want to seek.
Niu: Last question. In recent years, artificial intelligence has been adopted in assisting employers with reviewing potential candidates. What are your thoughts on integrating AI into this process? Do you think it can impact fairness or effectiveness?
Wright: Large organizations have relied on AI and algorithms for years to screen candidates, whether by filtering resumes based on keywords or through other automated processes I think one of the key issues is fairness—how these algorithms are designed and what they prioritize. The algorithm doesn’t know right or wrong; its outcome depends entirely on the data and criteria it’s given., The key is ensuring they focus on job-relevant characteristics, experiences, and competencies rather than unrelated factors that could lead to bias or discrimination. That’s where folks like us come in. That’s where an I/O psychologist who might not be trained in a large language model can help the employer build the algorithm in a way that’s both job-relevant and fair.
If we’re using AI to screen resumes, what factors do we prioritize? If the employer has an algorithm that favors candidates from the top 50 colleges, anyone outside that group could be automatically filtered out. A, that may not be job-relevant. B, by doing that, you might disproportionately impact individuals based on demographic characteristics, socioeconomic status, or other factors, which could lead to long-term equity concerns.
Niu: Thank you so much for speaking with us.
Featured Image by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash
