I think that the most important thing I have learned this term was the information we covered relating to interviews. With the company that I will be w0rking for after graduation, one of the career paths that I can pursue and am most interested in is the path of employee recruiter. I was hired through the company’s campus recruiter process, and faced a series of both structured and unstructured interviews with many different members of the organization. I think that my new-found knowledge of the interview process that I gained from this class will be very helpful if I someday hopefully end up in this role.
First, I learned the differences, as well as the advantages and disadvantages, of both structured and unstructured interviews. In my own personal experience, I have been a part of many more unstructured interviews, so it was really interesting to learn that this is typically not a very effective tool to use. Some of the disadvantages of this type of interview include a lack of job relatedness, the naturally poor intuition of human beings, a negative information bias, and a similarity bias. On the contrary, some of the advantages to using a structured interview are better predictive validity, an easier process to defend in court, and an ability to pick up on things that other tests (such as a cognitive ability test) are unable to grasp.
I also learned a lot about how to develop an effective structured interview. Now knowing the six types of questions that can be used (clarifier, disqualifier, skill-level determiner, future-focused, past-focused, and organizational fit) as well as the most common scoring methods for such an interview (right/wrong, typical answers, and key issues) I feel as though I would be able to develop a strong list of interview questions and an accompanying scorecard for a round of interviews.
This knowledge has also given me a better insight into how to prepare for my own interviews in the future, what to prepare for, and little tips and tricks for success. For example, due to the negative information bias that exists, I will try and keep negative information to a minimum in my interviews, even if it is what the interviewer is asking for. Another example would be, knowing of the similarity bias, I will try and use the subtle hints from the interviewer related to how he/she is sitting, facial expressions, gestures, etc. to pose my own movements and reactions.