Gary Will's WORKSEARCH:
Selling Yourself To An Employer
Chapter 20: (continued)
Recent developments in interview formats
From the book How to Prepare for an Employment Interview.
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[Chapter 20: continued from here
] In highly structured interviews, the employer may not even ask any followup questions. And they may come into the interview with a list of benchmark answers developed from a "job analysis" and scored from best to worst.
If so, your responses will be compared to these benchmarks, and whatever you say will be reduced to the score of the answer that comes closest to yours. In other situations, an interviewer may just assign a score to your answer without benchmarks to guide them.
There's no evidence that this technique produces better hiring decisions, but it is an excellent way to defend against accusations that the process was unfair.
Most selection interviews are now structured to some degree. Highly structured interviews with benchmark answers and no followup questions are rare, but in most cases the interviewer will have a list of basic questions they will ask everyone. At least this way, when you're asked a question you think is a real killer, you'll have the comfort of knowing that any others being interviewed will face the same test.
Interviewers that have been trained by industrial psychologists tend to use experience-based structural interviews, with questions focusing on specific behaviours that you have exhibited in related jobs or situations. This is why it's so important to go through your work experience for specific incidents and stories that you can discuss in the interview. You have to be ready to give examples of where you've demonstrated the skills and abilities that are needed for the kind of work you're now looking to do.
Something you may be able to use to your advantage in a structured interview is that it should be easier to get the interviewer to move on to a new subject. Since they always have the next question right in front of them, they're more likely to move on to a new area when you've completed your answer. There's usually much more continuity between successive questions in an unstructured interview.
The SITUATIONAL interview-"What would you do if ..."...[Continued here ]
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