MGMT 453 Week 5 Blog

When you are interviewed for an employment opportunity at your company, I would hope that you would ask me questions pertaining to the job you are hiring for. I’m not one to “tell you about myself” especially when I could decide once the next question leaves your lips that I don’t want to work for you. As an interviewer, your job is to find the best possible candidate for the position and the questions you ask should reflect that.

Believe it or not, I once applied to get my first job when I was 15 years old. I still remember the interview to this day as it was dry, awkward, and boring. I’m sure it had a lot to do with a child being the interviewee but I can still remember some of the questions to this day. They were pulled straight off a “10 best interview questions” website because the first one I got was “tell me about yourself?”

10 years later and I’ve learned a whole heck of a lot more about what an effective interview looks like. Based on all of this experience, I believe the most effective way to interview someone is through an unstructured interview. It is my opinion that the best way to get to know someone is to go for lunch and/or just ask basic human questions about their background, family, life experience, etc. The best candidate for the job is most likely going to be someone who is a good person but also has the right qualifications, experience and so forth. I think there should be a couple of situational and behavioral questions sprinkled in there but not obvious ones where the interviewee can provide an answer that you want to hear. It has to be questions where the answer isn’t obvious but the answer also tells the interviewer a lot of information about the interviewee. Open ended questions also work well because the interviewee can’t lie their way through it. Although there isn’t one way to have an effective interview, I believe that the things I discussed above can foster one.