Op de site van de New York Times kwam ik dit bericht tegen.
It is no secret that weather affects mood, and even behavior. Along came Donald Redelmeier and Simon D. Baxter from the University of Toronto with an interesting question: do applicants to medical school suffer if they happen to be interviewed on a rainy day? Redelmeier and Baxter looked at the data for nearly 3,000 applicants over a six-year period. The result:
Overall, those interviewed on rainy days received about a 1 percent lower score than those interviewed on sunny days (average score 16.31 v. 16.49, p = 0.042). This pattern was consistent for both senior interviewers (16.39 v. 16.55, p = 0.08) and junior interviewers (16.23 v. 16.42, p = 0.041). We next used logistic regression to analyze subsequent admission decisions. The difference in scores was equivalent to about a 10 percent lower total mark on the Medical College Admission Test.
Wat doe je als recruiter met dit soort inzicht? Tja …… Het aardige van sociale media is, dat in een reactie op dit bericht we een tip lezen die wellicht kan bijdragen aan een beter verloop van een sollicitatiegesprek bij slecht weer.
This problem is easy to fix , and this time it is the social psychologists who figured it out. If the interview is on a rainy day, the interviewee should start by making some small talk about the weather. Norbert Schwarz and Gerald Clore did a study in 1983 where they called people at home on a rainy or sunny day and had them rate their overall life satisfaction. People reported being significantly less satisfied with their lives overall when they happened to be called on a rainy day compared to on a sunny day. But if the caller started by saying, “By the way, how’s the weather down there?” then the effect went away and people reported being just as happy on rainy days as on sunny days.
Everything seems a little worse on a rainy day, but we don’t think about the effect of the rain on our judgments, so we attribute the negativity to something else, like ourselves or the person we’re interviewing. But if you’re made aware of the rain, even in an indirect way, then you can compensate for it when evaluating yourself or another person…….
Alexander Crépin