Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A job applicant tells the interviewer that the best available data suggests job interviews are largely pointless, and that even resumes tell us nothing about a person's ability to do the job well. The interviewer acknowledges the irony: her own job is to evaluate whether applicants can do their jobs, even though she is statistically unable to do hers.

The applicant then says "So..." and the interviewer, seemingly won over by this meta-awareness, asks the applicant to sing her name as if there is a heroic opera about her to demonstrate "team spirit or whatever." The applicant exclaims "That's beneath my death!" but then we see her belting out "CHERYYYL STOCKDAAALE!" operatically -- alongside 78 other applicants doing the same thing, implying this absurd request is the standard hiring process.

The Humor

The comic satirizes the well-documented ineffectiveness of traditional job interviews. Research in industrial-organizational psychology has indeed shown that unstructured interviews are poor predictors of job performance, yet they remain ubiquitous in hiring. The interviewer's admission that she is "statistically unable" to do her job of evaluating candidates is a darkly honest acknowledgment of this paradox.

The punchline escalates the absurdity: since the interview process is acknowledged to be meaningless, the interviewer replaces it with something equally meaningless but far more humiliating -- having candidates operatically sing their names. The final panel showing 78 applicants all doing this ridiculous task suggests that when hiring methods are known to be arbitrary, companies might as well make them entertaining. It also comments on how job seekers will endure almost any indignity for the chance at employment.

References

The comic references research in personnel selection psychology showing that unstructured job interviews have low predictive validity for actual job performance. Notable studies by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter (1998) found that work sample tests and cognitive ability tests are far better predictors of job performance than traditional interviews, and that the added value of an unstructured interview is minimal.