Month: October 2024

What made the interviews you have experienced effective/ineffective, especially when you think about reliability, validity and utility?

In my life thus far, I have only done four interviews. Looking back on the few interviews I have done, most of them were effective. Now, take this with a grain of salt as my brain is not as it used to be, even though I am only 25 but that’s beside the point. Now when it comes to reliability, validity and utility, I am not quite sure how they set up their interviews internally, but for the main ones that had happened with more well-known businesses, those went rather well. I found the questions asked of me were pretty typical questions about my challenges, weaknesses, strengths, how I would handle a hypothetical situation, etc. I did have one of those interviews not be an actual interview, rather I got the job without interviewing, in a child care facility, which in itself is crazy to think about after the fact, and I immediately was given trainings to complete to be considered “qualified.” That specific situation was poorly thought through, very ineffective, and really dangerous for the children. The company in question actually closed down shortly after I had left due to poor child management.

If you could go back and advise those employers on how to improve the effectiveness of their interviews, what would you tell them? 

If I could go back and advise the employers on how to improve the effectiveness of their interviews, I would likely tell them to try to create a rapport with interviewees to make them feel more comfortable. Only 1/4 interviews made me feel at ease. All the others were unwelcoming, stressful and made my brain go completely blank, which then made me feel lost on how to answer questions. If an interviewer can connect with an interviewee, as explained in the Week 5: lecture 4 – Improving Interview Effectiveness, for this week, about the interview-related errors and biases, it could make the entire interview process much more pleasant for both parties.

I, personally, have had no experience at all with creating and maintaining job descriptions, but I do understand how tedious it can become. For example, For my work, we have to help another team find which emails need to be updates on a regular basis. To do this, we have to go into each individual email and find specific keywords and then add them to the list for the next team to assess. I am talking about this because of the reasonings behind employers not including things, like pay, in their job descriptions. There isn’t enough time in the day to track down each job listing a business has created to change based on what the salary or pay is that month.

Job descriptions can be difficult to create and maintain because times are constantly changing. As I mentioned above, if a company has the salaries posted in job listings, they have to go in and occasionally update the application with the new pay. This is the same with other types of details that may be found in the job descriptions, i.e., legal and environmental compliances. As explained in the article Job Worth Doin: Update Descriptions by Kathryn Tyler, there are significant risks in job descriptions that can be detrimental to a business. If a business doesn’t keep a very clear job description that is up to date with the required responsibilities, they can have a possible lawsuit on their hands.

Choosing strategies in how you want to address the gap that needs filled in your employee pool is a great start. As mentioned in Lecture 3: Workforce Planning for Week 4, asking how fast the gap needs filled and if the gap is expected to be long or short term begins the process, the “nature of the gap,” or how much human suffering would be caused and how easy or hard the consequences would be if the position wasn’t filled. In other words, if the business doesn’t fill that position, how detrimental will it be for the company? Lastly, the other considerations like training, quality/quantity impact and safety/morale implications if that position is not filled. All of these can create difficulties in creating a job position, but also create a significant amount of insight into just how important jobs within the company are.

Tyler, K. (2023, December 21). Job worth doing: Update descriptions. Society for Human Resource Management. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/hr-magazine/job-worth-update-descriptions