Interviewing Skills-1

2006-10-02T06:27:00.000-07:00

In the last few months, I have done several workshops on interviewing skills. Here, I am placing some musings from same

Preparation - Most interviewers jump too quickly to actual interviewing. They spend very little time in studying the CV, matching it with the job and looking for the focus areas for that specific candidate. On probing, their reasons for this comes out as one or more of the following –

They just do not have the time.
They see no need to ‘waste’ time on getting to know what to look for in the candidate. Isn’t the job profile, as handed over by the HR, good enough?
No guidance is available to them to match a CV with a Job profile.

Validity & Reliability - Most interviewers do not understand these essential requirements of a good interview. On these, they make the following errors –

Validity – Many interviewers ask questions purely for the sake of asking, without considering whether or not it is a valid question. A valid question is one which actually checks the aspect whatever it is supposed to be check. Here, an important derivative of validity comes to mind. Not only should the question be checking what it is supposed to check, the aspect being checked should actually be contributing to job success. It is possible to end up asking questions which do check what they purport to check, but the aspects being checked have nothing or very little relation to job success. What a waste!
Reliability – An interviewing process would be termed reliable if the evaluation ratings by two interviewers to the same response are not too different one from the other. Alternately, the same response given by two candidates separately to an interviewer must not get significantly different ratings. Reliability increases when the possible responses to a question are considered beforehand and graded on a scale. On first thoughts, such a system appears too mechanistic to many. When it happens in my sessions, I ask them a pointed question - How would they react to an interviewing process in which the result depended not so much on their own responses but on who ( Mr X or Mr Y ) happened to be the interviewer? Most people see the point immediately.

Approaches to framing questions - Most interviewers do not understand the various approaches to framing questions. They just take up the CV and start a conversation. Actually, there are distinctly 3 approaches to framing questions, each having its own strengths & weaknesses for different interviewing scenarios-

Alok Asthana
www.mind-skills.com
alokasthana@yahoo.com

Musings of a trainer