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
