I think one of the most important and valuable things I’ve learned in this course was how to conduct and create structured interviews. Since I already have a job lined up after graduation, I think that this information could benefit me in the future. I hope to advance within my company and if/when I do, I may have to go through the process of interviewing and hiring someone. To start out, I would need to determine the KSAO’s (knowledge, skills, and abilities) required for the position I am hiring for so that I know what I am looking for in my candidates. I can do this by conducting a thorough job analysis and from there I can determine the KSAO’s.

To create my interview questions, there are six different kinds of common questions that I can ask. There are the clarifiers which are questions that allow the interviewer to clarify information stated in the applicant’s resume. There are the disqualifiers which are questions that must be answered in a particular way to continue on with the interview/hiring process. There are skill-level determiners that tap into an interviewees level of expertise. There are future-focused questions that have the applicant describe what they would do in a hypothetical situation. There are past-focused questions that have the applicant provide specific examples of how they demonstrated job-relatedness skills in a previous job, and there are organizational-fit questions which tap into the extent to which an applicant will fit into the culture of an organization or with the leadership style of a particular supervisor. It would be my job to go through each of these types of questions and figure out which kind(s) would be best to use when interviewing for the position.

I would then need to create the scoring key. I learned about the three different types of approaches for that which include the right/wrong scoring approach (Is most useful when the correct answer to a question is black and white and really easy to determine), the typical answer approach (you will attempt to list all the possible answers to a question that the applicant could possibly provide, then have subject-matter experts with expertise and a particular job rate each possible answer in terms of its favorableness), and the key-issues approach (Subject-matter experts will create a list of the key issues that should be included in the perfect answer to a given question).

In order to conduct the interview successfully, there are six steps I would need to follow; build rapport, set the agenda, ask the questions, provide information on the job and organization, answer applicant questions, and end on a pleasant note. Thanks to this class, I now know how to conduct an interview in the correct way. I hope to be able to use this information and knowledge to run an interview one day!