The art of interviewing
It is now many years ago since I was first interviewed as a job applicant. The interview took place in the office of the manager of the particular place of employment, and the only people attending were the manager in question and me. As I recall, it lasted for about five minutes. I don’t actually remember the questions he asked me, but I do remember that as I left the office I wondered what benefit he could possibly gain from the encounter, as none of the questions seemed to me to be particularly relevant to anything. Maybe one of the reasons why my memory is dimmed is because, just after the interview began, I developed this overwhelming urge to sneeze. Not wanting to blow germs all over the office, I tried (successfully) to suppress the urge, and it is this struggle with the sneeze rather than the substance of the questioning that I remember most vividly.
A few years later I was interviewed for the first time for a university job. This time I faced an interview panel, but was rather put off by the fact that one of them, an elderly professor, was visibly asleep throughout the entire occasion. I was asked rather general questions by the first two panel members, and amazingly detailed ones by the third – so detailed that at the end of each question I was totally at a loss to work out what exactly he wanted to know. I didn’t get the job.
I am now a very old hand at interviewing. Apart from the interviews that did or didn’t get me jobs, promotions or other benefits, I have been a panel member at countless interviews, and more recently the panel chair at many more. And over that period of time the process of interviewing has become much more formal, and much more process-driven. There are rules and regulations, and guidelines and handbooks. The casual unpredictability of interviews has now largely gone from the system, as has (on the whole) the risk of negligent discrimination in the process. Gone are the days, thankfully, when anyone would even think of asking female candidates about their family responsibilities.
But while we have swept away many of the misuses of interviews, I’m not sure that we really know what we want interviews to deliver or how they can be genuine tools for finding the right answers to our recruitment, promotion and similar questions. A little while ago I was asked to attend an interview panel in another (non-university) organisation. As the panel met, we were given a list of questions that were to be distributed amongst the panelists. We were told to ask the questions verbatim as written down and to ask no follow-ups. We then had to mark the answers according to set criteria and marking schemes. And finally we were told that the successful candidate would be the one with the highest marks, and that this could not be set aside. While in some ways I admired the clarity of the process, I could not see how it provided the panel with any real sense of who would be the best candidate, but more particularly I could not see why the panel was needed at all, since almost everything here was automated. The event took an absurd twist when the first candidate was visibly flustered, and when asked a gentle question by the panel chair he revealed he had been in a minor car accident on the way to the interview. He was put at ease, but before the second candidate was ushered in the panel chair made my jaw drop to the floor when he suggested that all candidates would now need to be asked about their experience in travelling to the interview, for consistency and fairness.
I have moments when I doubt the value of interviews. However much we standardise them, many panelists will find it hard not to be influenced in the end by their superficial impressions of the candidate’s personality, and interview outcomes can be quite arbitrary as a result. On the other hand, I don’t know of any selection method which is both fairer and reveals information that really matters. And so in the end what matters is that interviews are conducted intelligently and sensitively, that interviewers are trained in the process, and most crucially that candidates are put at ease. These guidelines used by Loughborough University in the UK seem to me to be sensible. My own practices in chairing interviews is to attempt to ensure that we are fair, that we are friendly, that we are on time (it is unacceptable, I believe, to keep candidates waiting for long periods), that we stick to relevant questions, and that we allow the candidate to talk (i.e. no long questions or monologues by interviewers).
I must admit that I am much less persuaded that it is a good idea to standardise all the questions and to remove any possibility for individuality or spontaneity, as is suggested by these guidelines. There must be a middle way between the reckless abuse of the process that might have been more common once, and the one-size-fits-all standardisation that some now propose. In universities in particular an interview – like other processes – should not be stripped of its intellectual potential.
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May 25, 2009 at 1:10 am
Okay, where on earth did you manage to find that second link? I couldn’t find any information at all about the author (beyond his name) and what his standing is, or why the notes exist in the first place. Beyond that, there are inaccuracies (what he points to as the halo effect is actually the opposite effect, the ‘horns’, and behavioural questions don’t involve hypothetical situations; they ask candidates to give real examples). The site is also out of date, with the last update ten years ago – and it’s also based on (ten-year-old) Canadian practice.
Though I do agree with your criticism of your recent experience. While it’s important to be consistent, an interview should be a conversation in which there is rapport between candidates and interviewers, and failing to allow follow-up questions can mean that a candidate who is nervous isn’t put at his/her ease and doesn’t get to show why s/he might be the most suitable person for the job. Interviews are subjective and always will be, and it’s simply not possible to turn them into a testing tool along the lines of QuickTestPro!
May 25, 2009 at 9:22 am
Oh… please not QuickTestPro. It sucks. Use Selenium:
http://seleniumhq.org/
The in-joke being that Selenium is a treatment for Mercury poisoning. Mercury (or HP if you prefer) have made some very clunky products.
May 25, 2009 at 6:56 am
Interviews as a concept, are asked to do something they cannot do. Find ‘the’ person for a roll.
I feel the very best one can hope for is that 40% are declared unacceptable, which has you with 60% equally valid applicants. And with them you may as well hand round a bowl of fresh Cherries, see what they do with the stones and decide from there.
Beyond that, you may as well put a pin in the list of the 60% as one does with the Grand National.
May 25, 2009 at 8:31 am
Like democracy, interviews are a terrible system, but still better than any of the alternatives. From my own experience, I now think of them as being like exams: even though they do get progressively tougher as you progress through the system/up the ranks, you also get better at them, and you can definitely become someone who is good at interviews in the same way as you can become someone who is good at exams. Also, the more you’ve done in your career, the more you have to talk about in interviews, which bizarrely makes them easier, even though panels are more demanding of you.
I’ve only recently begun to sit on hiring panels myself, and have been shocked at what hard work it is, and even how stressful it can be. The feeling of responsibility (to both the candidates and your own institution) is enormous.
And as Wendy has commented, the idea of not allowing follow-up questions, or of insisting on identical questions for all candidates, is madness.
I do think that interviews as they’re conducted in academic institutions – with a teaching or research presentation and also a standard interview section – are essential, because it gives panels a chance to gauge what candidates will be like as lecturers. Without that, it would be impossible to tell how a candidate will perform in one of their more vital roles, that of being ‘on their feet’ in front of a crowd.
May 25, 2009 at 9:33 am
There are to my mind two types of interview. The ultra formal variety where the interviewer feeds the stock interview questions and the candidate returns the stock answers, learned by rote from some interview techniques book. These are much like exams as Jilly pointed out.
The other type throws all of that out the window and turns the interview into an informal chat. While the former variety is probable the most suitable for university interviews as it is the fairest, it is very hard for the interviewer to gain anything meaningful out of the experience.
Some people are very guarded in formal interviews, whereas, with an informal chat you can learn a lot more about the candidate, and I believe it gives the candidate a better opportunity to express themselves.
May 25, 2009 at 12:00 pm
I’m not sure I agree with you about an ‘informal chat’ being more effective, or necessarily benefitting candidates.
Surely only the most green of candidates doesn’t approach an ‘informal chat’ with just the same degree of preparation and possibly guardedness as they would a more formal interview? Certainly when I’m giving graduating students advice before their first real job interviews, I always advise them to regard informal chats as serious interviews, and anyone more experienced is definitely going to take this attitude. So I would have some concerns that the more informal style might simply disadvantage younger candidates who might possibly take the informality at face value, and then suffer for it in how they’re judged. Surely an informal interview is just as much of a performance as a formal one, just a different kind of performance?
May 25, 2009 at 2:57 pm
If one wants a Pilot for say MeathAir and given that she has the hours and the licenses. What extra info can you get from an interview.
It seems to me that one does not so much get a job with an interview as loose one. And one should always always look at the Christmas knees-up as a large part of the interview for the next promotion.
May 25, 2009 at 4:17 pm
I quite like doing interviews, both as panel member and as interviewee. As the latter, I don’t mind being asked ‘stock’ questions – I believe it’s up to the interviewee to show imagination in the answers! Nowadays, one usually allowed show a few overheads, which definitely makes it easier.
I also agree with Jilly – an interview is by far the best way for a panel to gauge how an applicant will appear to students…
May 26, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Cormac, you wrote: “I also agree with Jilly – an interview is by far the best way for a panel to gauge how an applicant will appear to students”.
I would be cautious with that, myself. The atmosphere at an interview, and the type of pressure which it imposes on the candidates, is generically different from what you experience at lectures. I’ve seen extremely good and confident lecturers fall apart in interviews. It’s one reason why I never become aggressive or unfriendly during an interview, nor will I allow anyone else to be.
May 26, 2009 at 2:34 pm
As someone who recently applied for a postgraduate course at DCU, I was amazed by the requirement for my date of birth and my age on the application form. I wondered why was this information requested. If I was applying for a job, an employer would not be permitted to ask for this information so why should DCU be allowed.
As it stands, I did not succeed in getting a place on the postgraduate course due to my lack of relevant work experience. The latter statement amused me due to the fact I have approximately 20 years work experience.
May 28, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Yes, fair point – they are different skills.
I never think of an interview as being agressive, but now that I think of it, I remember being put off my stroke by a single one agressive panel member at UL..
May 30, 2009 at 4:31 pm
I have recently been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome (high functioning autism), so this comment is written from an Autistic perspective. For many adults with AS, the interview process is a huge barrier to employment. The UK National Autistic Society states that only 12% of adults with AS are in full-time employment compared with 49% of people with other ‘disabilities’ and 81% of non-disabled people. http://www.nas.org.uk/nas/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=528&a=4508
My own experience of interviews has not been particularly great. I find questions like: ‘So tell me about yourself’ very abstract and ‘What would you do if X happened’ very difficult to answer. Having AS is like being from a completely different planet, where I just don’t speak the same language as everyone else. It can be quite difficult trying to ‘sell’ myself, particularly as I find it quite difficult to verbalise my thoughts at the best of times. I don’t necessarily see interviews as the best way of measuring a candidate’s suitability for the job. From my own autistic perspective, I would hope that interviewers are very understanding and appreciate the fact that I communicate in a slightly different way to most other people. Ideally, I would hope to participate in a voluntary work-experience trial to assess my suitability for any jobs I plan to apply for in the future.