Month: April 2022

There are three companies that come to mind when I think of the worst interviews I have ever been in as a candidate for the position, but the biggest offender was The New Well. When I interviewed for a wellness consultant position at The New Well (they referred to themselves as a “wellness spa;” I eventually developed other opinions) which was a branch of the Grants Pass, Oregon-based company Club Northwest, they had multiple candidates interview for the position at one time. This felt odd and strangely competitive, as though all of us candidates were being pitted against each other even more than if we were to just have been interviewed separately. I’ve been in interviews where there were multiple interviewers interviewing me, but this approach of having us all around the table getting interviewed by one or two interviewers and answering in turn just felt odd and it made me feel like none of us were worth the time investment that interviewing us separately would have required. This had to have been ineffective. Additionally, I distinctly remember that none of these interviewers were taking any notes during the interviews, and considering there were multiple interview candidates being interviewed simultaneously, I really didn’t know how they would be able to remember each of our answers or how valid their recollections of our answers were going to be without written observations. I think that this method of interviewing would be subject to whatever the interviewer was thinking or feeling that day, rather than the things that they could have written down in the moment during the interview. As mentioned in How to Take the Bias out of Interviews (Bohnet, I. 2018), unstructured interviews have been proven to be ineffective, and at certain points in this interview, the candidates were encouraged to converse with each other in an unstructured format and to worry less about the actual questions that were being asked by the interviewers. I think this was an effort on the interviewers’ part to observe our rapport-building skills, but it was definitely misguided, and I would encourage them to take the time to interview people individually in the future for improved interview effectiveness, validity, utility and reliability.

Citations:

Bohnet, I. (2016, July 18). How to take the bias out of interviews. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved April 25, 2022, from https://hbr.org/2016/04/how-to-take-the-bias-out-of-interviews

One challenge that I have personally experienced regarding job descriptions is that I was hired for a job in the medical field several years ago that I assumed was based off of the job description that was listed on the job search engine Indeed. This job description was briefly touched on in the interview process. When I actually started working there, I was then informed that certain things about the job description were no longer accurate.  In reality, approximately half of the job description was accurate. This created some confusion for me and made me wonder why this was not kept up to date. Looking back I wonder if the human resources department at that company really kept their descriptions up to date across the whole company in general and if they realized how this may impact the company and the individuals who work there. I understand that for a lot of individuals, updating job descriptions may not seem like something deserves high priority status on a to-do list, but I think that regular updating of job descriptions seems like a great way to make sure that not only the right people are attracted to the job, but that those employees will feel like what they are asked to do at work is reflective of their actual job description. This idea is mentioned in Job Worth Doing: Update Descriptions (Tyler, 2013) by director of HR operations for Insperity, Janet Flewelling. Also mentioned is the hypothetical situation in which an employee’s job description and actual work day don’t match. I have experienced this and I know that it can reflect poorly in the employee’s mind on the organization of the company. One way to make sure that job descriptions are updated on a regular or annual (at minimum) basis is to schedule this. It’s one thing to say that it “should” be done, but it shows more initiative to actually schedule these job description reviews and for this schedule to be visible to all of human resources and management so that everyone makes an effort to prioritize it.