Job interviews evaluate individual's competencies. Applicant's skills, knowledge and personalities are matched to the position on offer and to the Company's corporate culture.information of the applicant ensures that strengths and competencies are identified and where further guidance and training is required.  Technical insufficiencies and incompetence should not be revealed after the finalization of the job offer.   

From inexperienced recruiters to unprepared interviews, outdated methods and selection errors continue to waste resources.  

PROBLEMS

Impression Management

The qualities that make a person successful in a face-to- face interview does not equate to the person who is the best match to the job. Often the job is offered not to the most qualified but rather instead to the person who knows how to make the best impression. Interviewers are   swayed towards selecting applicants who are best able to present themselves well in person.

First impression Effect

Applicants that are skilled in impression management can favorably affect the interview’s perception towards them, whether they are the best match for the job or not.

In the first few minutes, the interviewer has already made judgment based on:-

• Appearance
• Body language
• Grooming
• Handshake
• Personal presence/ style
• Eye contact
• Articulation/ speech patterns/ inflection and
• Personality

Bias and Subjectivity

Applicants will naturally have varying degrees of shared views and common interests with the recruiter. Is it the Interview’s opinion that defines an applicant’s confidence as arrogance or when assertiveness is aggression. An interview’s biased perception of the candidate can greatly affect the selection outcome.  

Outgoing and extroverted personalities are associated qualities of ‘likeability’. This is an unfortunate disadvantage to the 30% * of the population considered introverted.

Leading questions

The inexperienced interviewer may unknowingly ask leading questions up to 40% of the time **. Applicants asked to describe past experiences will obviously select situations that best reflects them. Interviewer’s who question candidates experiences via a checklist are also likely to be met with enthusiastic pre-empted responses.

Problems with Unstructured interviews

With its causal and informal lines of question, the unstructured interview serves no purpose as a collection process of relevant data. Without consistency and structure, comparison between applicant’s competencies for the position cannot be identified.    

Problems with Structured interviews

Many of the questions in structured behavioral-based interviews are targeted to transferable skills that make up to 75% ** of each job. As these competencies-based interviews are time consuming to develop, Interviewers are commonly found to ‘recycle’ these questions. Answers to these questions are now easily available from varied sources, resulting in well prepared and memorized responses.

Without the skills of the experienced Recruiter, the improvements of the Structured Interview are minimal.  The experienced recruiter can accurately identify the true competencies of the applicant, to reveal those that are a true match to the position and those that only appear to be.  

SOLUTIONS

Need to uncover competencies

Uncovering an applicant’s competencies needs to be the focus of the interview.

With effective listening and observation skills, the interviewer can easily identify which candidates possess true skills and the experiences to be successful. The interviewer must probe the applicant’s responses to uncover the degree of truths relevant to the position.

Performance based Interviews  

In performance based interviews, applicants are required to “work” – and perform real components of the job and/ or to verbally resolve typical problems of the new job.

In this way, technical competencies of the new job are objectively assessed. Applicants that are genuinely qualified for the job are easily distinguished from those applicants who only claim they are, or whose qualifications are only relevant elsewhere.

As performance interview are based directly from the job, they are also easy to prepare and update.  END ◘

* Statistics provided courtesy of CareerJournal.com http://www.careerjournal.com/jobhunting/interviewing/19971224-richardson.html

** Statistics provided courtesy of HR Strategy http://www.hr-guide.com/data/A301.htm