Effective interviewing 1: structure
March 7, 2008
I’ve been doing lots of interviewing recently and this has led me to focus on how an interview should be structured and carried out to ensure the best outcome. Interviewing can be quite a subjective activity, and decisions can often be made on a number of aspects that aren’t related to the actual skills and abilities of the candidate. For example, when an interviewer gets a first impression of a candidate they will often ask questions that are designed to confirm this impression: the self fulfilling prophecy effect. Or interviewers will give preference to candidates they perceive as being similar to themselves, in background, career history or even just in personality. This can lead to a team of workers who are too similar – they have similar skills on offer, similar skill shortages and decision making within that team may be poor due to the fact that everybody is coming from the same point of view and therefore may lose sight of the alternatives. Interviewers need to base decisions on the needs of the job and not on the perceived or stereotyped type of person that is required.
A way of reducing the possibility of poor decision making is to carry out a structured interview process. Structuring the interview around a person specification by coming up with set questions derived from the job needs has a number of positive outcomes:
- The interview is relevant to the job, not the person. Asking questions only based on the CV or application form could mean that important aspects of the job role are overlooked due to the focus on what the candidate has done before.
- Giving each candidate the same set of questions means that you are measuring them against the same criteria and therefore increases the reliability of any comparisons.
- Basing the questions on the needs of the job increases the accuracy of the prediction of how well the candidate could do the job.
- This method lets the candidate link their answers to the most relevant parts of their experience, rather than interviewers asking about their previous experience and then assuming the links to the role on offer.
I think the best way to prepare for the interview is to discuss the needs of the job with the manager of the team, as they will know best what is required; then this can be put into a person specification. Normally a person specs lists the job needs under different headings such as experience, education, skills, knowledge and personal attributes and then each set of criteria is assigned as essential or desirable. Once the final version of the person spec is ready, it’s quite straightforward to develop questions based around the criteria so that all aspects of the job are covered in the interview. I’ll look at questioning techniques in the next post.
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