The Art of Interviewing

The Art of Interviewing

What picture comes to your mind when I say “Interview”? Two people, sitting across the table with one’s hands on his/her lap with a generally erect posture sitting on the edge of the seat and the other with a more forward and relaxed posture with his/her hand resting on the table. This is the picture that comes to my mind. What does your mind outline on your imaginative canvas? Maybe you'll remember the worst or in few cases best of your interviews ever or may be your last interview.  

We all have got jitters about interviews at any point of our career and would have gone through volumes on “How to be successful in interviews?” and endless sessions with our seniors and peers on what all to keep in mind while attending an interview. But does anybody think about Interviewing? I guess nobody or a very selected few. Why? Because you don’t lose anything evident while interviewing. Yes, you have got the hint. I am not going to talk about the entity i.e. the interviewee which most discuss under the heading of Interview.

Here we will talk about the other entity in the picture I have described above; the one that is more relaxed with his/her hands on the table with a forward posture. 

Before going ahead I will put forward certain questions for your thinking process to set off in the direction we are moving ahead. They are:-

1. Generally how many interviews on an average do we attend or get rejected to before we are finally selected? 
2. Have you been able to decipher the exact reason/s for your rejection/s?
3. Do you have any idea as to how many resumes are shuffled through, how many are short listings and how many various levels of interviews a company conducts for a single position?
4. Do you know how big the cost involved in the process of recruitment is?

I would like you to give answers to all the above questions to your own self according to your own understanding and experience of the subject. A few more pondering questions to follow the answers to the above questions:-

1.      Have you given a thought to the fact that for the same skill set and similar positions how many different feelings you get after say n numbers of interviews?

1.  Compare this with the n number of written tests given by you with the same level of preparation.
2.  How many times you have felt that your interview went just fine and you were not selected and vice versa i.e. like you didn’t perform at all and you were selected?

What do we decipher from the above brainstorming? 

Yes, the biggest influential factor on which the outcome of this exercise interview depends is the entity – Interviewer. 

Before discussing over the Art of Interviewing we need to understand what the purpose of an interview is. We will see various definitions of Interview.

The Dictionary meaning of Interview is:-

A formal meeting in person, especially one arranged for the assessment of the qualifications of an applicant.

1. A conversation, such as one conducted by a reporter, in which facts or statements are elicited from another.
2. An account or a reproduction of such a conversation.

The Business definition of Interview is:-

A somewhat formal discussion between two parties in which information is exchanged. For a business looking to fill an open job position, an employee might interview potential candidates to gain a better understanding of their backgrounds, qualifications and skills.

Now, I think we have a clear and agreed upon understanding of the purpose of this exercise called Interview. To elaborate it further I would like to state that it is a process of assessment of potential candidates on the basis of given facts i.e. the job description of the open position and the written Resume of the candidate.

Hope everybody agrees upon my statement as well.  I have kept it confined to the business purpose only. There can be interviews for various other purposes also like for example a reporter interviewing a celebrity. But, on second thoughts, is it really different.

Can we give it a thought and see how different is the Interview taken by a reporter to the interview taken by an employer? Let’s compare it columnar form.

                                                    Interview

Reporter	Employer
Interviewee is a celebrity	Interviewee is a common man
Interviewer wants to have a news to sell	Interviewee is here to take up job for living.
Interviewer has done a thorough research	Interviewee has done the Research here
Interviewer has to extract maximum info	Interviewee is concerned give out the max
Interviewer is fully prepared	Interviewee is prepared here

I have refrained myself on the preparedness of the employer in the above comparison. There can be a few more points to compare the difference or the relatedness of both types of interview. But, I think these points are enough to let your mind wander on the same paradigm as mine is. It will be easier for me to make you understand my view point. 

Now, again reviewing the above comparisons, the only interpretation that I can make out is that only the entity who is to gain the maximum from this exercise is different i.e. the reporter in the first and the interviewee in the second. Otherwise, the sole purpose of the process is same i.e. to extract maximum information on a certain context from the interviewee in question.

I will take my leave here with a note to all my readers to retrospect all the interviews you have been a part of either as an interviewer or an interviewee and we will discuss it further in the next post. 

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