Conducting an Interview for the First Time
A few months ago I was put into a situation which required me and couple of others to conducts interviews where we would be responsible for putting a team together. Now I have never taken an interview before and so not wanting to get it wrong looked up different methods of recruitment for different situations. Below is what we decided to do and the reasons why, of course a different method of recruitment maybe needed.
We decided to contact each candidate that was interested in the position for the team asked them to confirm their interest once again, times/dates commitment and asked them to send us in a paragraph which best described them. This criterion wasn’t used to ‘score’ them but more of way to get to know a little bit further about each candidate before meeting them face to face.
Our method was to conduct the interview in a panel of people and not just one. We felt that this would improve the reliability of the interview as often bias can arise where the interview may not particular like the interviewee, by having more than 1 interview this will ensure a fairer process. Validity was also importance to us, often candidates may try and ‘act’ in the way they feel is best for the job and so by asking a series of questions where some are repeated and rephrased allowed us to get a more accurate answer, both questions should bring about the same answer.
As the role in question was a team role we felt that it was important for the candidates to get to know each other and so felt that a group interview would be best. We understood that it was possible for them to know one another so when the interview took place, all candidates were randomly positioned. This allowed us to monitor how well people got on with another.
The team that gets put together would be involved in quite a few presentations to important people and as this skill was key we asked candidates to firstly do a small presentation about themselves. Powerpoint and other media weren’t allowed as the presentations that they would be conducting didn’t use these. As well as getting to know candidates it was a good way for potential team members to network and see how confident they were with presenting. The idea of randomly positioning people was also important as well as individual presentations we asked for a group presentation where we would present each ‘team’ with a different scenario and they were asked to come up with a ‘solution’. Again, group presentations and team work was key. Canidates were also allowed to ask each other questions which allowed us to spectate the style of questions asked as well as the replies.
I think that if I were to be involved in something like this again that involved putting a team together I might look at sending questionnaires out before the interview and review this against Belbin’s team roles theory. Also a scoring system would help to improve the over-all reliability of the interview. In any case it was a valuable tool in my learning and development to be involved in this.
