The Art Of The Interview

Tell Me How You’ve Developed Your Art Career So Far

Potential employers may ask about your career development to learn more about your previous experiences in the art industry and the knowledge you gained from various roles. This is an important question for employers to get to know your background because, for many art roles, there’s no definitive path that candidates must follow to reach a certain point in their career. To answer this question, consider the decisions you’ve made since you decided to become an artist to reach your current position. Then, explain some ways you’ve developed your career, like by taking art classes or expanding your network.

Example:”I’ve developed my career as an art instructor by doing commissions for custom ink drawings and working as a preschool teaching assistant. Each of these experiences and practices allowed me to become a better and more patient artist who can connect deeply with those attending my classes and teach them the basics of pen and ink drawing.”

Related:Top Arts Careers for All Types of Artists

What Kinds Of Questions To Ask

What kinds of questions to ask in an interview: Generically speaking, open ended questions that elicit more than a yes or no answer. Keep questions short and dont try and bundle several questions into one long one everyone will lose their focus. One of the easiest and best questions is the one that journalist, writer Studs Turkel recommends: And what happened next? Its open ended, general in nature, and shows that you are really interested in whats on the table.

When I come to the end of an interview session I usually ask, Is there anything that we missed today? or What shall we talk about at our next session? and Did we have fun?

How To Improve Interviewing Skills

Whether youre an HR manager or a department lead, improving your job interviewing skills will help you in your professional journey. It will improve your communication and interpersonal skills. Speaking clearly, in a way thats understood by the candidate, is an effective interviewing skill.

Lets explore some of the ways in which you can enhance your interviewing skills:

Also Check: List Of Interview Questions For Employers

Talent Acquisition Is A Numbers Game

Imagine having to sort through tons of resumes, selecting a choice few, scheduling interviews, sending reminders, and interviewing job candidates one after the other. This routine can easily result in fatigue. Fatigue can lead to interviewers failing to ask the right questions or overlooking red flags, which can lead to a bad hire. Bad hires are extremely expensive in a multitude of ways the dollar cost, losses in productivity, negative impacts on team morale to name just a few.

Another often disregarded but vital part of the hiring process is feedback collection. No, we are not talking about the interviewer’s feedback about the candidate that is common. Feedback is provided to candidates to help them understand why/why not they have been selected and how they can get better.

But dont stop with the candidate. What about feedback for the interviewer: Did they ask the right kind of questions, did the candidate feel comfortable, did the interviewer engage well, did they represent the organization in a positive light, and so on.

In a recent article on Forbes, Sanjoe Tom Jose discusses the interview process today and shares some valuable insights.

The Art Of The Interview

Its not that different from a cocktail party.

At The Atlantic, we spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a good interview. Last week, we put this question to the Atlantic writer who has probably been interviewed the most, Ta-Nehisi Coates. The best interviews, Ta-Nehisi said, are ones where its clear the journalist is not faking it. To learn more about what makes a good interview, I talked to two of The Atlantics interviewing pros, Managing Editor Adrienne Green and AtlanticLIVE Executive Producer Rob Hendin. Both Rob and Adrienne focus on interviews for an audienceRob typically works behind the scenes, setting up conversations at events and on television, and Adrienne conducts interviews herself. Todays issue explains how the professionals do it.

Help us make a guide to The Atlantic. There is no definitive guide to The Atlantic, so today were asking for your help in creating it. If you read an Atlantic story that you loved this month, hop over to this and spend a second to help us index it. Well ask you to give us a few words to describe the story, which well turn into a master index of everything The Atlantic published in January. And well throw a little swag to the member who helps index the most stories. Give it a shot here.

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The Art Of The Interview: Can The Right Questions Uncover The Truth

Former CNN White House Correspondent Frank Sesno discusses his new book, which covers the role of the media and how questions can illuminate the truth.

Former CNN White House correspondent Frank Sesno discusses his new book, which covers the role of the media in public discourse.

The best, most informative interview begins with thoughtful, insightful questions. Thats the lesson learned from former CNN White House correspondent Frank Sesno, who spent decades interviewing world leaders. Sesno, now director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University, shared with Knowledge at Wharton what hes learned in his new book, Ask More: The Power of Questions to Open Doors, Uncover Solutions and Spark Change. He spoke about why its important to learn how to ask the right questions on the Knowledge at Wharton show, part of Wharton Business Radio on SiriusXM channel 111.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge at Wharton: I would be remiss if I didnt ask you about whats been going on at the White House with all the back-and-forth with the media.

Frank Sesno: It turns out my book on asking questions and listening for answers is more timely than I had imagined. We will talk about that and the way we can all use these questions in our lives.

Knowledge at Wharton: Or Marc Zuckerberg coming up with Facebook.

Knowledge at Wharton Podcast

Check Your Body Language

Nonverbal communication is as important as verbal communication. The way you sit, move your hands and your facial expressions make a difference. The candidate is likely trying to read you just as much as youre trying to read them. If you appear disinterested, they may become nervous about their answers, which can affect their confidence. Appear friendly and approachable to make the candidate feel comfortable in your company.

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Issue 219 Winter 2016

Claudia Rankine was born in 1963, in Jamaica, and immigrated to the United States as a child. She attended Williams College and received an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University. Since early in her career, she has crossed the lines of genre, creating books as unified projects rather than loose collections, peeling back the surface of the moment to get at the complexities underneath. She is the author of five booksNothing in Nature Is Private , The End of the Alphabet , Plot , Dont Let Me Be Lonely , and Citizen and has collaborated on a series of videos with her husband, the filmmaker John Lucas, some of which infiltrate her writing in the form of transcriptions and images.

I met Rankine over three Fridays in July at her home in Claremont, California. It was a tumultuous period: our first conversation took place the week of the police shootings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in the suburbs of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the ambush killing of five police officers during a rally in Dallas, Texas the third, the afternoon after Donald Trumps speech accepting the Republican nomination for president. These public topics wove through our discussions, explicitly and implicitly, as they often do in Rankines work. Long a professor at Pomona College, Rankine was preparing to move across the country for a new job, at Yale University in her dining room, the sideboard was covered with piles of books on race and whiteness, for a course she was developing.

INTERVIEWER

RANKINE

Describe The Best Piece Of Art You’ve Created

An interviewer may ask you about the best piece of art you’ve created to determine what you define as a successful art piece, how confident you are in your abilities and whether you can accurately describe the positive characteristics of a work to someone else. This information is valuable for most art positions, but it’s especially important to describe your work to potential buyers. Consider a recent artwork and detail a few aspects that made it unique, technically masterful and visually appealing.

Example:”My best piece of art is a ceramic tea set that took me months to perfect as I studied classic tea-set shapes worldwide and combined them to represent my cultural heritage. The teapot, each cup and each dish are white clay formed on a kiln and by hand, and the pieces all show a roundness from far away that matches well with the smooth, shiny glaze. I also colored each piece in pale blue and dark orange to represent my contrasting heritage, which increases visual interest.”

Related:14 Jobs for Artists Without a Degree

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Lets Talk About Process And The Work That Comes After An Interview A Lot Of People Seem To Think That An Interview Is Just A Transcription The Journalist Has Come Up With These Brilliant Questions And Asked Them In The Right Order And The Interviewee Has Come Back With These Completely Coherent Answers And Those Go Verbatim Into The Piece And Its Done But That’s Not Actually How It Really Works There Is Quite A Bit Of Crafting Of The Story After You’ve Done The Interview Figuring Out The Arc Of What Was Said And What The Meat Of The Piece Is Going To Be But Thats Sort Of Hidden Work At Least To The People Reading The Finished Piece

There’s a huge amount of work that happens after the conversation has occurred. In terms of verbal filler alone, there’s so much you have to cut out. Or if someone changes verb tense halfway through an answer. Thats why, more and more, at the end of interviews publications include the disclaimer, This conversation has been edited for clarity.

But beyond that, I think of my job as to deliver the most insightful, interesting interview that I can. Not everything that was said during the actual conversation ends up being interesting or insightful, and some of that is even a little bit by design. If it seems like someone is a little guarded, there might be 15 minutes of me asking them fairly gentle questions in an effort to soften them up. Obviously all of that is cut out of the final interview because it’s not interesting to read those answers.

Youre creating an arc. Its a form of storytelling. You dont want a conversation to feel meandering and disconnected. Youre trying to create something that has narrative momentum and tension and little moments of release.

When you’re going over a piece, youll get a sense if something is boring. Sometimes the temptation is to think I don’t want to deal with cutting all of that out. But I think it’s very important to cut out all the boring stuff. You can accomplish a lot that way.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

What About If You’re Asking Someone Something That’s Difficult Or Something You Can See They’re Hesitant To Answer Is There A Way To Frame A Question In A Way That Makes Them Feel More Comfortable

Obviously you can’t always get somebody to talk about something that they don’t want to talk about. But the one thing that I’ve consistently found helpful is when I’ve said to the subject like, “Look, I know this is hard to talk about,” or, “I know this is something you might not want to talk about,” or even saying This is not an easy question for me to ask. When I’ve done that, it’s very rare somebody still comes back and says, Let’s just move on. I don’t want to talk about that at all. I think if youre being explicit to the person about the fact that you understand that your question is putting them in a difficult position, or might make them feel uncomfortable, or even acknowledging to them that it’s uncomfortable for you to ask itthat demonstrates emotional understanding. You’re not someone who is only interested in pushing their buttons for the sake of your job. If you can show that youre not just a clinical question-asking robot, my experience is that people then usually give you something back. Theres an emotional reciprocity in that exchange.

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Build Rapport With The Candidate

If you believe the candidate is a great fit for your organization, you should build rapport with them. For instance, if they mention something they like to do outside of work, you can ask further questions to keep the conversation flowing. Its a good way to understand a candidates cultural fit, their values and beliefs.

Interviewing skills can be refined over timeall you need to do is be proactive in seeking opportunities to do more of it. If your team is hiring someone newand if youre in a position toyou can ask to interview candidates. After all, practice makes perfect.

Tell Me About Your Techniques For Overcoming Creative Blocks

Creative blocks are common for people in creative careers, and potential employers like to know how their employees overcome those types of challenges. Questions like this one help employers ensure candidates understand they must often submit work despite these challenges and show interviewers you understand yourself and your process well enough to find solutions to creative blocks. Try to answer this question with two or three techniques for overcoming creative obstacles that work best for you and help you stay on track for meeting work goals with your art.

Example:”When I encounter creative blocks with my work, I often switch between projects or take a timed break before attempting to continue a piece. If I feel very challenged by a piece, I might change something about it or work on it a few minutes at a time to ensure I finish it by my deadlines.”

Also Check: What Is An Open Interview

Whats Wrong With The Current Interview Process

Have you ever felt the candidate you really liked and hired for a position is constantly underperforming? Or did someone with a great resume turn out to be drastically different than you expected? This can be the direct result of a poor interview process.

While going with the gut feeling might have been an accepted way to hire candidates years ago, it not only fails to scale to meet todays enterprise needs, but it is also utterly foolish in today’s labor climate. Interviewing is a skill we assume we know well because we have been doing it for so long. A deliberate effort to analyze today’s interviewing techniques can yield interesting results.

Often, interviewers select candidates because they like them instead of looking at their competency, behavior, attitude, and ability to learn. This is what we call bias. Interview bias, unfortunately, is more prevalent than you think. Many times, this is unconscious, i.e., you don’t even know you are being biased towards a candidate. It could be because you’re from the same place, enjoy the same kind of music, or any of a number of factors.

General Artist Interview Questions

Interviewers may ask the following general artist interview questions to learn more about who you are and why you’re interested in a career as an artist:

• Where are you from and how does that affect your work?

• Who are your biggest artistic influences?

• Tell me about your favorite medium.

• Where do you find inspiration?

• When is your favorite time of day to create?

• Describe how art is important to society.

• What motivates you to create?

• How do you define success as an artist?

• Does art help you in other areas of your life?

• How do you develop your art skills?

Also Check: What Do You Need For A Job Interview

Another One Of Your Really Memorable Sit

Yes, about a year after he retired. The nature of that interview was a little bit surprising to me, because Letterman doesn’t necessarily have a reputation as the warmest guy. He was that way on his showkind of prickly and sarcastic. So I was prepared for him to maybe not be that forthcoming or just kind of be not the easiest interview. But I really think that getting him when he wasn’t in the middle of a bunch of other stuff and when he hadn’t talked expansively in the recent past was beneficial. It really seemed like he just had things he wanted to talk aboutpolitics or reflecting back on his career or his life now. The depth of his answers about certain things was surprising. Id asked him a question about his son, and whether he really had a sense of what his dads career was like. And he just had these intimate, funny stories about him and his kid. That his son would sort of roll his eyes when Letterman would complain about his hamburger order or something. He’s not someone who was known for divulging a lot about his personal life before. So when he was talking about that stuff, it was clear to me that he was being open in a way that I wasn’t expecting going into the interview. And I think that openness is a lot of what people responded to. Seeing him unfiltered.

The Art Of Interviewing

Every interviewer was once an intervieweeand its important to keep that in mind the next time a nervous candidate enters

Every interviewer was once an intervieweeand its important to keep that in mind the next time a nervous candidate enters the room.

If youre making your debut as an interviewer, youre probably excitedand also a little relieved youre not on the other side! But you might be a little nervous too about evaluating someone elses goals and aspirations.

Doing a good job as an interviewer means both you and the candidate are satisfied at the end of the meeting. Discover more about interviewing skills and how you can improve as an interviewer.

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