The personality of interviewers

Even the most structured competency-based interviews are aimed at collecting data about the personality of interviewees. There are countless books for interviewing professionals on what traits to look for, what questions to ask, and how to interpret the answers to those tricky, perspicacious questions. But there is no explicit recognition that the personality of the interviewer may play a very significant role in the whole interview process. So do different types/personalities make different decisions on the same people given the same criteria? Presumably they know what they are looking for and have agreed specific criteria in terms of a candidate’s abilities, attitudes, experiences, personality, and values. So why is there ever any disagreement? Were the criteria not clear? Did the questions not elicit data to satisfy the criteria? Often both of these are true. But there remains one other factor — differences in the personalities of the interviewers which have to be factored into this equation.