The results of this study offer small comfort to companies who rely upon campus interviewers as a primary recruiting medium. By and large, they are not reaching the students in a meaningful way. There is a signal lack of communication between companies and students, when the campus interviewer is the medium of communication. The study also pinpoints the weak links in this chain of communications and makes it possible to repair them. By using the techniques of product market research, it is possible to learn what the consumer wants; to tailor the product to his needs; and to communicate more effectively with the consumer.
The structure of the interviewer organisation should follow; from the functions this organisation has to perform. These functions are of a very special kind, not comparable with other, occupational functions. They are also quite different from those of the researcher and analyst. The interviewer as an individual has to be a conscientious mechanic who carefully follows instructions. The less left to his initiative, the better. For, as a whole, the interviewer organisation must function with the smallest possible variance, that is to say, interviewers should ideally be interchangeable. In order to achieve these aims, a strongly centralised interviewer organisation must be set up. A uniform procedure for the selection of interviewers must be developed which operates on the principle of statistical probability in selecting promising interviewer material. Once selected, the interviewers must be controlled closely and continuously and all possible sources of deviation from the norm must be weeded out as soon as they are detected. For selection as well as for control, test systems must be developed. A number of psychological tests now in use for various purposes can be adapted for interviewer selection, while others have to be now set up. Control tests can often be built into the surveys, for example by split-ballot techniques. Also, selection and control tests can be combined with a training program.
My belief in interviewer selection and training in the simplest terms t we spend a lot of time in studying the problem before we embark on a survey s we take a lot of trouble over sample design and over preparing and testing a questionnaire! we spend a lot of time on coding and editing the completed questionnaires, analysing them and preparing the tables and sometimes we write a report that is more than 200 pages long: all this work might be valueless if we had not also made sure that the interviewing on which it was based had been properly done.