For this assignment, I can only reflect on interviews that I have done for my past two internships. These interviews were unstructured and were more focused on what I knew so that the company knew how to structure the internship so that I gained the most out of it. The unstructured nature of the interviews made the reliability pretty low in my opinion. They asked very general questions, and I was liable to give a completely different answer if I was in a different mood or if it was a week later. These questions included the basic “tell me about a time where you faced adversity” and things of that nature. The questions for my second internship had decent validity from my perspective. They asked me about my background with statistics classes and what I did with large data sets (data analytics internship). They were looking to assess my technical background in the field so that they were aware of what tasks I could help the company out with. I was also made aware of the selection process at this company for this principal consultant role. This process requires applicants to solve a very difficult scenario in Power BI, which is the main application uses by principal consultants. After this test filters out most of the pool, they move on to a round of interviews. This test seems to have very good reliability and validity, as it has been described as testing if applicants are not good but great at solving problems with Power Querry and Power BI. I am not sure about the utility of this test, since I am not sure what it costs to administer to applicants. I would say that the utility of my personal interviews has been good, since the only expense was about 30 minutes of the hiring manager’s time. Overall, these interviews were effective at discovering what applicants were capable of, which is the primary focus when bringing on interns. I think that the principal consultant process also seems to be effective, as every employee at the company seems to be the best of the best at the skills that were tested.
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