Some relationships between interviewers' personal feelings about candidates and their general evaluation of them

In a study of 551 initial graduate recruitment interviews, 103 interviewers provided a general evaluation of each interviewee. They also indicated how much they liked each applicant personally, and rated his intelligence. Fairly strong relationships were found between liking and overall evaluations, despite the fact that most interviewers did not expect to work with candidates personally. The relationship that was observed between ratings of intelligence and general evaluations was only slightly reduced when the effect of liking was held constant. This was interpreted as suggesting that there may be both affective and cognitive components in interviewers' evaluations of candidates. The possibility that interviewers allow their personal feelings about candidates to bias their judgement of them was also discussed.