The last company I worked for was a large conglomerate that had companies in the chemical, aerospace, glass, and paint industries. This company was large enough to have an HR Department at its headquarters, but there were no HR personnel stationed at the facility where I was applying for a job. The person tasked to do the hiring process for my position as an operator/engineering technician was the department head/engineering manager at the facility although, during the interview, he was aided by the other department head at the facility to help with questions and provide their opinion. The company used a structured approach to the interview process among other tactics.
To help the company in the recruitment process, they asked the Oregon Employment Department, where I found the job listing, to filter out the candidates interested in the position. Before I could get the information about who the employer was, I had to answer a couple of job-related questions. After I answered the questions to their satisfaction, I was able to apply for the job. This allowed the company to meet one of the recruitment goals, which was to establish a pool that maximizes the best possible candidates for the position they were trying to fill. Although the size of the pool of candidates interviewed for the position when I was hired is unknown to me, an old coworker who was hired a year later told me that he was one of the candidates interviewed and considered when I was hired.
The company used a structured approach to the interview which seemed to consist of standardized and behavioral questions which I assume were asked to candidates. The interview included questions that gauged my general cognitive and reasoning abilities in areas such as math. They also asked job-related questions where I had to explain the type of work I did with my previous employer who is in a similar industry. Lastly, I was asked behavioral questions where I had to tell them about specific examples of how I approached certain situations when performing a task at my previous employer. The interviewers were able to build rapport with me and did not add to my already feeling nervousness about the process which allowed me to be more open about my knowledge and experience than I would have otherwise. However, I still remember being nervous enough to forget the name of an aspect of the job. The interviewer noticed, quickly said the name, and accurately categorized my forgetfulness as me just being nervous.
The interviewer then took me to the area where other employees in the same department where I would be working were working and left me to talk with them, ask questions about the job, and see the type of work I would be doing if hired. The employees also get to ask questions about the candidate and their job experience. This is a critical step in the interview process because after the candidate leaves, the interviewer will come back to ask about the employee’s opinions of the candidate. This is a great approach to the interview process because the candidate does not know the employees will later be asked about them and the candidate usually lets their guard down and behave more like themselves instead of the type of person they want the interviewer to see. It would also be my understanding that the engineering manager would also consult with the other department head who aided in the interview process to give their opinion about me or whoever the candidate was.
Overall, I believe the combination of structured approaches in their recruitment, selection, and interview methods used by my last employer gives great reliability, validity, and utility to their process of finding the best candidate for this particular position they are trying to fill. Because the company is large enough to have an HR department that has probably trained its hiring managers well in the hiring process, there is nothing I would advise them to improve the effectiveness of their interview process for the position for which I was hired. They go to these lengths because they want to keep the turnover rate of this employee level as low as possible because hiring, training, and bringing up to speed such employee takes about a year and is very costly. They do not use this same process for employees at their lowest employee level. For those employees, the process is more streamlined, less costly, and finding replacements is much easier because the qualifications needed to do the job are few.
