That's according to a study from 2000 which is cited in Google senior vice president of people operations Laszlo Bock's upcoming book, "Work Rules!"
The study, by Tricia Pricket and Neha Gada-Jain, two psychology students at the University of Toledo, and their professor, Frank Berieri, found that judgments made in the first 10 seconds of a job interview could predict the outcome of the interview.
In a recent LinkedIn post, Bock shares a condensed preview of the book. He writes:
"Most interviews are a waste of time because 99.4 percent of the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed in the first ten seconds."
He explains that interviewers do this by asking questions like, "Can you tell me about yourself?" "What is your greatest weakness?" and "What is your greatest strength?"
In other words, he writes, most of what we think of as "interviewing" is "actually the pursuit of confirmation bias."
So, the lesson here is this: Yes, you always need to make a killer first impression - but it's just as imperative that you maintain and reinforce it throughout the entire conversation.