Remembering back to college admissions days (which many of\u00a0you might have kids going through that right now), one of the best\u00a0parts of the whole process is doing the college tour thing and\u00a0doing interviews at the various prospective schools. For 4\u00a0year degrees, the risk of not performing well on the interview is\u00a0probably minimal, but it\u2019s a stressful time anyway. There\u2019s a\u00a0very well known medical school in the U.S. that requires an\u00a0interview for all of its candidates, and the interviews routinely\u00a0take about 10 to 15 minutes to conduct. Never has an\u00a0interview been known to take more than 30 minutes, God forbid we\u00a0actually find out that much about our candidates. In truth,\u00a0you get the tour of the campus, then you are seated with a number\u00a0of other prospective students while you wait your turn to be called\u00a0in for the interview. You could be sitting in there for\u00a0minutes, or hours waiting, after which you go in for your\u00a0freakishly fast 10 minutes where you cover topics as mundane as,\u00a0\u201cHow was your summer?\u201d and \u201cWhat kind of food do you like?\u201d<\/p>\n
These are obviously quite difficult screening questions, akin to\u00a0the tense corporate lunch interview when you are forced to pick\u00a0between coffee and tea after the meal. After the short 10\u00a0minutes, you are thanked and ushered out on your way with, \u201cYou\u2019re\u00a0all done for the day.\u201d Most of us would be crushed. We would\u00a0walk out, find a little hole to crawl into, and weep. After\u00a0all, our hopes and dreams of attending one of the top medical\u00a0schools in the world has just been dashed. What we didn\u2019t\u00a0know, was that was not the interview. Indeed, behind a glass\u00a0window (think police headquarters) is the entire admissions\u00a0committee watching if\/how you interact with your fellow\u00a0candidates. What type of a person are you? What do you\u00a0talk about? Who do you talk to? After, \u201cYou\u2019re all done\u00a0for the day\u201d there is a choice to be made. Are you the type\u00a0who picks up and leaves? Do you sit around on your iPhone\u00a0waiting for your ride to come pick you up? Do you start\u00a0conversations with some of the other prospective students? In this\u00a0case, the reality is to be literal – you are not supposed to stand\u00a0apart and set yourself as better than the rest. Most organizations\u00a0like to consider themselves \u201ccollegial\u201d and excellent places to\u00a0work where people trade information freely and willingly.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, since we don\u2019t usually do panel interviews where we\u00a0have multiple candidates being pitted against each other at the\u00a0same time, it\u2019s tough to observe whether or not a person is really \u00a0going to be collaborative once we hire them. And I don\u2019t\u00a0really feel like submitting my Director-level candidates to a 2\u00a0hour personality assessment test. Our only real feedback at\u00a0current is the candidate\u2019s interaction with the receptionist and\u00a0other people who might be sitting in the lobby while they\u00a0wait. However, we almost never ask the receptionist what they\u00a0think, and they aren\u2019t really trained to give an expert opinion\u00a0anyway. What is important to us when we recruit is a combination of\u00a0what a person knows, and who a person is. We are quite adept\u00a0at figuring out what a person knows, but less skilled at knowing\u00a0who a person is over the course of four 1-hour interviews.<\/p>\n
Managers and recruiters alike are supposed to be semi-skilled at\u00a0reading candidates, but unless we have a full-on behavioral\u00a0psychologist interviewing, I\u2019m not sure our read of candidates is\u00a0anywhere near perfect. We all know that when we are in front\u00a0of a hiring manager or presenting to a client or whatever, that we\u00a0are on stage. Reading the candidate when they are \u201con stage\u201d\u00a0is not meaningful. It\u2019s about how they act when they are not\u00a0acting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Remembering back to college admissions days (which many of\u00a0you might have kids going through that right now), one of the best\u00a0parts of the whole process is doing the college tour thing and\u00a0doing interviews at the various prospective schools. For 4\u00a0year…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1796,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21,8,1,15],"tags":[287,286,72],"class_list":["post-1780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-branding","category-strategies","category-uncategorized","category-talent-acquisition","tag-behaviors","tag-interviews","tag-recruiting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1780"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1800,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780\/revisions\/1800"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}