The interview lottery

I believe it’s part of being a good manager to help people leave. That is to help them fulfil their potential and move on and up. This involves helping them write an application form and preparing them for an interview.

As a senior manager and an experienced interviewer I can look at a job description and a person specification and identify the type of questions that are likely to be asked. With my knowledge of the individual’s experience and skills I can suggest examples they might refer to in answering these questions.

“Even when given the answers some people can’t do a good interview.”

Recently I have as an interviewer experimented with giving all the candidates the questions in advance of the interview in the hope that they would provide more thoughtful answers on which to judge their suitability for the post. After all, the aim of an interview is to get the best out of the candidate and many a candidate has not done themselves justice through nerves or being thrown by obscure or long-winded questions. Most interviews have a presentation question which the candidate is given in advance, why not give them all the questions in advance?

I routinely provide candidates with detailed feedback. Going through each question, reviewing their answer, explaining what the panel were looking for and how they could answer the question better. Sometimes I have referred to another candidate’s good answer because often there is not one right answer.

I have sometimes re interviewed candidates using only slightly different versions of the questions only to discover that even when given the answers some people can’t do a good interview.

Assessment

Of course being good at interviews is not the same as being good at the job. What’s more, research has consistently shown that the traditional panel interview is deeply flawed. We tend to form our opinions about candidates within the first few minutes despite complicated scoring systems and questions designed to relate to specific areas of the person specification.

In fact the traditional interview panel is only interested in one question: ‘do we like you?’ This isn’t as daft as it sounds if we understand this to mean could I work with you, do I trust you, can I understand what you are saying and do we share values and beliefs?

The trouble is an interview situation is not the best way of finding this out. This is why assessment centres have become so popular as part of the recruitment process particularly for senior management posts. An assessment centre over a couple of days can test out a candidate’s numeracy skills, verbal reasoning, leadership style, interpersonal skills and provides an opportunity through an in tray exercise to gauge how they would response to typical work situations.

An assessment centre has many advantages provided it is used to decide who makes it to the interview. All too often all the short-listed candidates are interviewed and the assessment centre results ignored if they don’t coincide with the panels’ preferred choice. In view of which giving people the questions in advance and even the answers probably doesn’t undermine the process it just confirms interviews are a bit of a lottery.   

Blair McPherson is director of community services at Lancashire Council.

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