What Is A Structured Interview
Interviews may be placed on a continuum, from unstructured to structured. At one end of the continuum, an unstructured interview is completely unplanned questions are asked spontaneously, vary across candidates, and responses are not evaluated in any consistent manner. At the other end, the highly structured interview includes questions that are based on a thorough analysis of job requirements and the merit criteria required to perform the work. All candidates are asked the same questions and their responses are assessed in a standardized manner against job-relevant criteria using a predetermined rating scheme. These features help to establish a clear link between performance at the interview and performance on the job and minimize the impact of personal bias on the assessment process.
The following table presents the characteristics of structured versus unstructured interviews, in terms of development, administration, evaluation, and interviewer training.| UNSTRUCTURED | |
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Ask The Right Types Of Questions By Sticking To Behavioural And Situational Interview Questions
For a situational interview question , you can describe a major job requirement that the candidate will be doing on the job.
Using an example of a sales rep, you can ask candidates how they prospect for leads, and have them walk you through their approach.
For a behavioural interview question , ask the candidate how they handled situations that are likely to happen in the role youre hiring for.
How Would You Describe Yourself
With this question, your interviewer wants to learn how your qualities and characteristics align with the skills they believe are required to succeed in the role. To answer this question, pick one to a few personal characteristics and elaborate on them with examples.
For example, if you are ambitious and driven you can say: I am an ambitious and driven individual. I thrive in a goal-oriented environment where I can constantly challenge myself personally and professionally. I am always looking for an opportunity to do better and grow. These characteristics have helped me achieve success in my career. For example, I was promoted three times in less than two years in my last position.
Read more: Interview Question: How Would You Describe Yourself?
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Share Next Steps In The Interview Process
Near the end of the interview, consider outlining the next steps for the candidate to help set expectations. For example, share your intended timeline of making a hiring decision, when they can expect to hear from the company, or if another round of interviews is likely. Allowing the candidate to ask clarifying questions can also help establish an understanding of the next steps and expectations, too.
What Are Your Greatest Weaknesses
It can feel awkward to discuss your weaknesses in an environment where youre expected to focus on your accomplishments. However, when answered correctly, sharing your weaknesses shows that you are self-aware with an interest in continued growth and learningtraits that are extremely attractive to many employers. Consider using this formula for your response:
1. Select an actual weakness that is honest but professionally relevant:”Im naturally shy…
2. Add context:”…From high school and into my early professional interactions, it sometimes prevented me from speaking up…
3. Provide a specific example:”…After being a part of a workgroup that didnt meet our strategic goals two quarters in a row, I knew I owed it to my team and myself to confidently share my ideas…
4. Explain how you overcame or are working to overcome it:”…I joined an improv acting class. Its fun and has really helped me overcome my shyness. I learned practical skills around leading discussions and sharing diverse perspectives. Now, in group settings, I always start conversations with the quieter folks. I know exactly how they feel, and people can be amazing once they start talking.
Read more: Interview Question: What Are Your Greatest Weaknesses?
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Do You Perform Duties That Aren’t Listed In Your Job Description
Although many jobs come with specific duties outline in a job description, employers may ask this question to understand if their employees are taking on more responsibilities than they expect. They may ask this to ensure all employees work a fair amount and to decide if they should hire a new person to help support operations. Try to answer this question honestly and think about responsibilities that you and your team may take on regularly rather than occasionally.
Example answer:”Most of the duties I perform are outlined in my job description, but I often have to do other duties like checking patients in and filing paperwork. As the dental practice grows, it’s more challenging for me to do my work as a dental hygienist and make sure I can schedule all patients, bill them or their insurance and take phone calls. I think adding a dedicated receptionist to the team would be a great asset.”
If I Gave You 50000 To Start Your Own Business What Would You Do
“Hold on a second, I thought we were trying to hire them not invest in them!” Relax, this question is a great way to illustrate business acumen and creativity.
£50,000 is not to be sniffed at, but when it comes to starting a business it’s hardly a king’s ransom. As a result, candidates should think carefully about how they would spend it and what early hires or decisions would give them the best ROI.
The best answers will get specific. They might touch on logistics, hiring, product decisions and services. You’ll also be surprised at how creative candidates can get when you challenge them like this.
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Why Is A Job Interview Important
Job interviews are important because they give you insight into whether you want to hire a candidate. Often in conversation form, the questions asked in an interview can show you a persons skills, job capabilities, and how they contribute to the success of a team or organization. You can use job interviews to compare candidates or build a list of future talent options for other open positions.
The Arrival Of The Applicant
- The interview board should ensure the following preparation prior to the arrival of the applicant:
- Board members should meet at least 15 minutes before the first applicant arrives to discuss the interview format and to ensure that all necessary materials are available.
- Each board member should have a copy of the Interview Note-taking Booklet, as well as the Interview Assessment Booklet,for each applicant.
The following arrangements should also be made:
- Applicants should be provided with water and pens/pencils and paper for the interview.
- If applicants are allotted time to prepare prior the interview, they should be placed in a private room, given a copy of the interview questions , placed in a private room and given the following instructions:
“Here are the questions. You have ______ minutes to prepare for the interview. Here are the questions. You will then meet with the interview board. “
- Applicants should be allowed to bring the interview questions and their notes to the interview, so they can refer to them throughout.
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What Made You Excited To Get Up And Come To Work At Your Last Job
It’s true that many people dislike their jobs. For the companies that want to have the best culture and employer brand though, it’s important that employees are emotionally invested in coming to work. No doubt you have many employees for whom this is the case, your goal should be to swell their ranks!
Explore why candidates found their last role exciting and what motivated them to keep dig deep when the going got tough. If they didn’t find their last role stimulating, find out why.
Are they likely to find work at your company interesting? This is more important than you think. It can be a great motivator for those late nights and lengthy projects.
Show How You Fit Into The Culture
The company isnt just interviewing you to find out about your skills. They want to know if youll be a decent coworker. So your answer needs to prove that your goals and values are similar to the organizations, says A.P. Grow, associate professor of leadership at City University of Seattle.
Your research for the interviewgrilling friends you know who work there and reading up on the latest news about the companyshould give you a sense of the firms mission and values. Find spots where they overlap with your story and present them in your answer.
You say:This organization’s priorities for ethics, teamwork and effectiveness match my own. What’s most important to me is finding a place where individuals want to work together, as a true team. I see that reflected here. The match of what you need with what I can do is clear, and the additional benefit of having the same values and community interests lead me to want to be here more than anywhere else.
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Are You Interviewing Anywhere Else
If you’re not interviewing elsewhere, does that decrease your value? And if you reveal every detail of companies and roles you’ve been applying to, are you breaking any rules?
Check out these ‘are you applying for other jobs’ best answers, where we have broken the interview question down, with model answers for if you’re interviewing for jobs in other industries, if you are interviewing for competitors and if you’re not interviewing anywhere else at all.
How to answer are you interviewing anywhere else
In Five Minutes Could You Explain Something To Me That Is Complicated But You Know Well
This is a much better test of intelligence than a college GPA, and it’s also a great gauge of a candidate’s passion and charisma outside of their core job responsibilities. Candidates who are passionate and knowledgeable about something — and can convey that well — are more likely to be enthusiastic and influential at work.
A good answer to this question:
The “something” in this question doesn’t have to be work-related — it can be a hobby, a sports team, something technical … anything, really. Good responses will tell you how well your candidate comprehends complex subjects and that they can articulate that subject to someone who doesn’t know much about it.
Explanations that use analogies also make good answers, especially if it’s a topic that is filled with industry jargon. This shows that the candidate can solve problems by drawing comparisons to things that are more universally understood.
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Question : Describe A Time That You Failed
This question is a behavioral one, because it asks you to talk about a specific example that illustrates something meaningful about you as a professional.
Some variations of this question might ask you to talk about a conflict at work, a challenge, or a behavior that negatively impacted your team. So how can you describe a failure while still leaving a positive impression of your skills and abilities?
Tips On How To Conduct An Effective Interview
8 Tips on How to Conduct an Effective Interview
The goal of interviews is to hire the right talent the best candidates for a specific job. However, conducting an interview can be challenging, but hiring the ideal candidate makes the process worthwhile. Coming up with the right strategies, structure, and preparation on how to conduct an interview makes all the difference in your companys hiring process. However, the majority of recruiters assume they know how to conduct an interview and hence fail to plan effectively.
Conducting interviews is just one step in the hiring and recruitment process where preparation and structure are paramount to make the process successful. Establishing and implementing a specific system that acts as the basis of your hiring decisions will ensure your company overcomes interviewing pitfalls, identifies and hires the right people for the job.
If your main aim is to hire the best candidate, then its vital that your interviews are thorough and well planned for in advance. Knowing how to conduct an interview also includes knowing how to prepare for the meeting. Consider using the checklist below as you prepare to interview candidates.
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How To Conduct An Effective Job Interview
The virtual stack of resumes in your inbox is winnowed and certain candidates have passed the phone screen. Next step: in-person interviews. How should you use the relatively brief time to get to know and assess a near stranger? How many people at your firm should be involved? How can you tell if a candidate will be a good fit? And finally, should you really ask questions like: Whats your greatest weakness?
What the Experts Say As the employment market improves and candidates have more options, hiring the right person for the job has become increasingly difficult. Pipelines are depleted and more companies are competing for top talent, says Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a senior adviser at global executive search firm Egon Zehnder and author of Its Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best. Applicants also have more information about each companys selection process than ever before. Career websites like Glassdoor have taken the mystique and mystery out of interviews, says John Sullivan, an HR expert, professor of management at San Francisco State University, and author of 1000 Ways to Recruit Top Talent. If your organizations interview process turns candidates off, they will roll their eyes and find other opportunities, he warns. Your job is to assess candidates but also to convince the best ones to stay. Heres how to make the interview process work for you and for them.
Further Reading
Dont:
Integrating Interview Results With Other Information
Interviews are not usually the only source of information about an applicant. Customarily, there is the applicant’s résumé, which will include information about previous work experience and educational background. Information may also be collected through additional assessment instruments or methods such as work samples, simulations, assessment centres, written tests, career achievement records or reference checks. When collecting information from various sources, it is important to combine the information systematically in order to arrive at a final appointment decision. Otherwise, even when using valid selection instruments, combining the information haphazardly may result in poor, inconsistent decision-making.
If several methods are used to assess a qualification, it is advisable to collect the relevant information from all sources and to then make one overall assessment. This approach involves combining information from different sources to evaluate applicants and then determining which ones meet the qualifications. For example, all the information gathered in an interview with respect to a given qualification can be combined with relevant information elicited from a reference check. This information can then be integrated into a single overall evaluation, determining whether or not the applicant meets or does not meet that qualification.
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What Other Jobs Are You Considering
For the most part, candidates should be looking for jobs in similar fields. It doesnt matter if theyre looking at other companies or even other niches within a specific skill set.
What might raise a warning flag would be if theyve applied for non-managerial jobs as well as the manager position in your business.
Come Up With Specific Examples
Hiring managers often look to your past behaviors to get a sense of your future behaviors. They also want to see how your skills and experiences express themselves in concrete actions.
To prevent your answers from seeming overly vague, you should be ready with examples. To help you brainstorm, you might consider the STAR framework, which stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result.
You start by describing the situation you were in and the task that you had to do. Then you talk about what you did and how you did it, and finally elaborate on what happened as a result of your actions. You could talk about an impact that your action had on your team or what you might improve for next time.
To prepare for the various types of behavioral questions, you could collect stories that have to do with a time that you succeeded, failed, faced a challenge, handled conflict, demonstrated leadership, and impacted your team in some way.
Make sure that all of your examples, even the ones that point out a conflict or mistake, are success stories. Even if you failed in some sense, you learned from it and improved for next time.
If you dont have directly relevant professional experience, you should still root out examples from other jobs, your education, or even personal life that illustrate your qualifications.
Don’t look now you’re being followed! Your interviewer’s likely to follow your lead and ask follow-up questions based on your responses.
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What Is Your Greatest Achievement
When answering interview questions like this, it is important to think carefully before you answer – you need to avoid sounding like your bragging, whilst still demonstrating your achievement in a way that makes you stand out from other candidates.
Continuing our list of common interview questions with answers, click the link below to find out why employers ask this interview question, as well as professional and non-professional greatest achievement examples, ideas and sample answers to help you construct your own answer to the interview question…
How to answer what is your greatest achievement
Listen Actively And Intentionally
While you want the conversation to flow somewhat naturally, an interview isnt a typical back-and-forth conversation. Your main job in the interview is to listen.
A reasonable benchmark as the interviewer is to aim for the 80/20 rule: 80% listening and 20% talking.
Actively listen for the specific qualities and skills you identified as crucial to the role in advance. And listen for potentialyou may discover motivations or hidden nuggets that didnt show up on their resume.
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