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Asking Questions -- An Essential and Overlooked Step

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Putting a Spin on Work Experience

Recent developments in interview formats

The UNSTRUCTURED interview

Decades ago, the average employment interview was pretty straightforward. An applicant would get together with a manager from the company and have a rather free-form conversation about the applicant's background and the work the company was doing and what they were looking for in an employee. Some people still use this approach today.

This unstructured format is vulnerable to several potential problems. It makes it easy for a bad interviewer to do a poor job of assessing the interviewee's capabilities. Because there's no set structure, interviewers can leave some important areas uncovered, or some areas might be examined with some applicants and not with others, or they might be covered a little bit differently.

If the interviewer likes the applicant, they may go softer or probe less deeply. Or, if they don't like her, they may continue grilling until something negative is exposed. If more than one interviewer is involved, they might cover different areas or reach different conclusions about the quality of the applicant's responses. Impressions made within seconds often influence how everything the interviewee subsequently says or does is interpreted.

Thirty years ago, one of the top academic researchers on employment interviews concluded that "the interview as normally conducted in a selection situation is of little value." In an increasingly litigious society, with more and more government regulations on fair hiring practices, many employers have decided that reliance on techniques that score poorly in tests for validity and reliability is a risk they will no longer take.