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Nobody is a 'born interviewer'. But as leaders, we need to know what type of interview is highly effective and can guide us to better select the candidates we're looking for.
In general, the most commonly cited approaches to selection interviewing are:
1. Unstructured Interviews
Very difficult to anticipate, and can tend towards certain stereotypical verbal contents, ranging from cozy chat to nasty:
- What a nice school you went to.
- Yes, I love basketball too.
- And where are you going this Christmas holidays?
- Umm, let us read through your CV again...
- Why should we give you the job?
- Are you prepared to argue your case with such an eminent person as me?
Unstructured interviews provide little reliable or valid evidence by which to make selection decisions, no better than the equivalent usefulness of tossing a coin. Let's not be this kind of interviewer, or else a good candidate may also decide we are not the best company around.
2. Structured Biographical Interviews
Slightly more useful version of the 'Let us read through your CV again' approach. The interview will probably be structured in chronological order, starting at a reasonable point and then working through specific events/ achievement. But you must be able to link them into something useful. If not, this type is not reliable.
3. Behavioral Interviews
Most often anchored on the "Top Performer Profile," this is one of the more effective interview techniques. Very similar to the biographical style, the main difference is that the examples used to illustrate target competencies are not pre-defined by the interviewer but are left to the interviewee to produce:
- Tell me about a time when...
- How did you deal with...?
- What is the most difficult...?
The content of the questions, in the purest form of the behavioral interview, would come from critical incidents gathered during the job analysis that produced the competencies. This is quite a useful interviewing approach, as long as the interviewer has the discipline and the authority to keep interviewees focused on actual incidents, rather than on how they think they would react.
4. Situational Interviews
Sometimes called 'forward-looking' interviewing, this is based on the theory that 'some of the best predictors of future behavior are present intentions (as opposed to the common 'past behavior predicts future performance'). The candidate is asked to think of a situation, but this time is asked to tell you 'What would you do in this situation?' The job analysis should have provided "good, adequate and poor performance" examples of the required behavior, and so the interviewee's responses can be compared readily against the benchmark.
In the strictest form of this approach, the interview will be highly structured, with standard set of questions, no reference to the CV or other outside information, and little (if any) scope for the interviewers to probe the interviewee's responses in further details.
This, when combined with the Behavioral Interview, is for me the best and most reliable form of interview.
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