But he/she interviewed well (part 1).

So you want a job? Well first you have to decide what kind of job etc…
Actually let’s skip over this part and cut straight to the part where you have to go through an interview. Of course this may include a lot of parts these days, but let’s focus on the actual interview.

Question: What is an Interview?
Answer: A conversation with a purpose.

The purpose being to determine who, from amongst a number of short-listed candidates, best meets the requirements of a particular role. That all sounds quite straightforward. So, let’s see how this is achieved.
Well there is probably going to be an interview panel. That’s ok. They will know what they are doing. They have had the training. Let’s see, they will have been taught all about ORCE and STAR. What are those things?

Well, when conducting an interview a panel member should really be following a four step model:
Observe – what the candidate does if it is an exercise, e.g. role-play, or just how the candidate presents themselves in an interview situation.
Record – what the candidate says and does. This is one of the important points. Information should be recorded only, it should not be judged, classified or evaluated.
Classify – when the exercise, interview or other, is over then and only then should the data gathered be classified. Broadly this means put into categories.
Evaluate – simply means scoring the information which has been classified, as above.

That’s straightforward then. After training, probably provided by the Organisation’s HR department, following the ORCE principles should be straightforward. Er…, we’ll come back to that.

Before we do come back to that, it is worth also remembering that in the context of an interview, the interviewer should essentially be looking for information to meet the STARR criteria. As a reminder, interview answers should communicate:
Situation – the context in question;
Task – what had to be achieved;
Action – what the candidate did to achieve the required outcome in the given context;
Result – what was the outcome;
Reflections – what the candidate’s subsequent thoughts on the actions and outcomes are.

As Alexander, the Meerkat, might say “simples”. However, having been involved in many interview panels in the public, private and higher education sectors my experience is that it is never that simple. Despite the sometimes extensive training received interviewers/assessors fall prey to a range of biases. Whilst there is ample research evidence on these I will highlight four major sources of interviewer bias in the vernacular.
1. Affective heuristic. Just a posh way of saying the tendency to make snap decisions based on factors such as perceived attractiveness, race, gender socio-economic group etc…, none of which are relevant to the candidate’s suitability for the role.
2. Intuition. This is where gut reaction is used to guide decisions. Yes, I have heard manager’s say “I know one when they walk through the door”.
3. Anchoring. This is a tendency to place an arbitrary expectation on a candidate, which influences their view of a candidate.
4. Confirmation bias. Having made an all too quick, and hardly evidence based, decision on candidate suitability, interviewer’s are then prone to seek out information that confirms their affective heuristic.

Sticking to the ORCE principles may not be that easy. An interview should be focused on the garnering of appropriate knowledge. So, next time someone tells you that you or someone else “interviewed well” you might want to ask them what exactly they mean by that.

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Martin Coffey

About Martin Coffey

Postgraduate Career Development Adviser, Doctoral College Team.

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