Looking back on the interviews I have participated in, most of my experience has been in retail rather than formal business settings. I have had multiple interviews for retail positions, and they were usually more relaxed and conversational. Because of that, I have seen both effective and ineffective interview styles, even within similar types of jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of the better interviews I had were still somewhat structured, even if they did not feel very formal. The interviewer would ask similar questions about my availability, past work experience, and how I handled customer situations. This made it easier to understand what they were looking for and gave me a fair chance to explain my skills. Based on what we learned in class, this connects to reliability, since each applicant is being asked similar questions and evaluated in a more consistent way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Other interviews felt much more unstructured and focused mostly on small talk. In a few cases, the interviewer talked more about themselves or the store rather than asking me meaningful questions. While this made the interview feel less stressful, it also made it harder to show what I could actually contribute. These types of interviews did not seem very reliable because different candidates could end up having completely different conversations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Validity was also something I noticed, even if I did not have a name for it at the time. The more effective interviews included questions about real situations, like dealing with difficult customers or working in a fast-paced environment. Those questions felt relevant to the job. In contrast, some interviews included questions that did not seem connected to the role, which made them less useful in predicting job performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Utility, or how useful the interview is for making a hiring decision, seemed higher in the more structured interviews. When the interviewer focused on job-related skills and asked consistent questions, it felt like they were actually trying to compare candidates in a meaningful way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If I could go back and give advice to those employers, I would suggest using a more structured approach, even in retail settings. Having a consistent set of questions and focusing on real job situations would make the interview process more fair and more effective. Even though retail interviews tend to be more informal, adding structure would improve reliability, validity, and overall usefulness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Looking back on the interviews I have participated in, most of my experience has been in retail rather than formal business settings. I have had multiple interviews for retail positions, and they were usually more relaxed and conversational. Because of that, I have seen both effective and ineffective interview styles, even within similar types of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/futuremanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/futuremanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/futuremanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/futuremanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/futuremanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/futuremanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/futuremanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions\/10"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/futuremanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/futuremanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/futuremanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}