Interview Process


MGMT Week 5 Blog

The interview process for any company is such a vital aspect of a companys succes and future success in their industry. I have had many interviews in my career that varied from unstructured interviews to very structured interviews. I have also experienced interviews that I felt were relatively effective vs interviews that were a complete waste of time. I found that in my unstructured interviews, the company representative and I did not talk a whole lot about the job. We ended up discussing more relaxed topics such as my life outside of work as well as my experience with other companies. These types of interviews can be effective, but not as effective as structured interviews where more of the on the job experience is discussed.

The best interview process that I was involved in was recently at a local Construction company in which I applied to be a full time Project Engineer. This interview was conducted with a small group of candidates that met with 5 different employees of the company and was asked horizontal questions that were different with each employee. This was effective because it gave the employees a chance to compare apples to apples on responses from each applicant and see how they would handle certain situations. This is known as comparative evaluations and has been shown to reduce bias to the candidate that gets selected (HBR). This structure is effective in most industries and allow the employer to grade each response to the question and higher the candidate with the highest score.

One interview that I had in the past that I consider to be very ineffective was an interview for a golf course maintenance position two years ago. This interview was inefficient because they had each candidate fill out a form that had very vague questions and also included yes/no questions. These are both examples of ineffective structure because these questions do not generate good responses that the employer can analyze (Swift). If I was this employer then I would get rid of these types of questions and focus on deeper questions that will generate vital information that an employer can analyze.

References:

“How to Take the Bias out of Interviews.” Harvard Business Review, 18 July 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/04/how-to-take-the-bias-out-of-interviews. 

Swift, M. (n.d.). Lecture 5: The Selection Decision. Available at: W5 Lecture 5 – The Selection Decision.pptx.

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