Interview Questions: A Critical Review
Interview Questions: A Critical Review
According to Agyei and Christopher (2016), “getting the right people in the right place at the time doing the right job is an essential element of recruitment and selection process in organizations”. Therefore, it is important for managers to design selection strategies and interview questions thoughtfully.
This paper contains the review and assessment of the interview questions used by Southwood School District for their recruitment process. It further lists suggestions and corrections that can be opted for the future interview processes. Though the school improved a lot from its previous method of selection by introducing new website and providing advertisement in a new local paper, or even setting up student desk for selection, it still lacks in the interview questions asked.
Through interviewing, management can ascertain the internal urges of the client, and which is important to support his ability to express himself. The psychoanalytic position of the client can be easily understood by the management through effective interview. Good interview questions provoke the person to speak more clearly about all the aspects of daily life. According to scholars like Burmeister and Deller (2016), ‘knowledge transfer behaviour’ of the client has to be specially considered because certain personality traits cannot be changed easily.
Q1. Which subject do you enjoy teaching a) the least b) the most?
The advertisement in the paper/internet clearly states the subject for which the teacher needs to apply, for example, French. Therefore, there is no relevance in asking the candidate’s choice of subject as the school has the opening for the advertised subject only. A candidate applied for a specific job post would not say that he/she is interested in a different discipline.
Q2. How do you think you can contribute to the school development plan?
What contributions would you make to this school?
Both of these questions are overlapping each other. Asking the same question twice to the candidate does not let you know him/her better. The answer that you get would be the same. Moreover, these questions are very common ones, and therefore can be answered by any candidate if they have taken some preparations before coming for the interview.
Q3. What do you know about the school?
As stated in the package, each candidate is given a page containing information about the school like its geographical location, awards and recognitions, management structure and much more. The candidate will simply tell the personnel what they read on the page provided to them in their own language. Their views and thoughts would not be known.
Q4. How would you deal with disruptive students in the classroom?
This question is not appropriate for the selection procedure. Every person will have their own choice, their own methods. So, the candidate cannot be judged on the basis of his/her answer. Obviously, the management cannot instruct a specific strategy for the teachers to deal with issue. In this context, this question is irrelevant.
Suggestions/Corrections
According to DeCenzo, Robbins and Verhulst (2016, p. 169), “employment offers should come from HR, even though the decision to hire people comes from the management.” A few corrections can be made in the existing questions, like the student’s council can ask a few more questions regarding the candidate’s teaching style, their availability after school hours or on Saturdays for extra classes.
All the candidates applying should be given complete information. There should be no piece of information specified for a special type of candidate. Let them decide what is important for them and what is not.
Methods other than interview like references, ability and aptitude tests, group exercises, psychometric profiling etc should also be considered. Interviewing is not an effective method to judge a candidate’s real potential.
The candidates should be asked questions on which they can be judged and scored. Good questions can assess the candidate’s outlook, attitude, and aspirations rather than his abilities.
At the same time, questions related to very confidential or personal matters should be avoided to comply with legal requirements. For instance, an interviewer has no right to ask the client’s religion or race.
As noticed in the selection-day time table, there are too many interviews, and this tires up the candidate resisting him to give his one hundred percent till the last one. Small meaningful interview sessions should be taken with proper time breaks between them.
Instead of senior teachers, the teaching session should be attended by the students as they are the ones to be taught, and would be the proper judge. Collecting student feedback is important in this regard because a teacher’s ability to interact with the students matter a lot.
Feedback should be asked from each and every candidate after the interview irrespective of them being selected or not. It will enable the school to notice its positives as well as the drawbacks with regard to the interview processes.
Candidates, regardless of their performance and result, should be given feedback on their performance in the interview.
The candidate should be asked that how did they come to know about this job because their answer will help the school identify the most effective advertising method and can concentrate mainly in that area. Posting ad on unimportant media would cost money and time.
Complete information should be provided before the actual interview day, including details of the test venue time etc.
Some Relevant Questions
Q1. Would you speak lie for the school?
This question will let the panel know about the candidate in detail, his/her moral value, their confidence, their response speed and much more. It will provide them an insight into the thoughts of the candidate. The interviewing process involves individuals brought to a conversation for a specific analysis; therefore, it may be difficult to analyze all the variables of them as required by the objectives of the interview at a time.
Q2. Is it feasible to achieve our goals within the time frame provided? By what possible method can we do it?
The use of word ‘we’ will give a sense of family/team to the candidate. Hence, the answer given will be fully truth, and moreover, this will also motivate the candidate to achieve the goal (Completion of a personal as well as organizational goal).
Q3. What are your thoughts on team-teaching?
The answer of all the candidates would have the same theme like whether they like it or not, and this will help the panel understand the thoughts and the mind set of the candidate.
Q4. Why do you think we should hire you?
This will let the HR know about the candidate’s strengths, his/her confidence level (as usually candidates get nervous while answering these types of questions), their communication skills etc (Bock, 2015, Ch 4).
Q5. What is the description of your ideal job?
This is a tricky question. There will be two types of candidates; one who has crammed the answers to the interview questions by searching them online, and those who will think first before answering. This can be observed easily from the interviewer’s point of view. You want to look for the second category of people as they will give you their true opinion.
Conclusion
Human Resource Management should be seen as a logical, planned and strategic function of the organization and should be taken seriously. Finding the most suitable candidate may be a tough task but is not impossible. Choosing any candidate to save time will only have disastrous results. ‘It is the most important element in every organization’s management of people simply because it is not possible to optimize the effectiveness of human resources, by whatever method, if there is less than adequate match’.
Human resource management will be successful only when there are leadership qualities with a 2way communication with the employees. An open and honest environment is created where the employees feel that their ideas are listened by the management. Considering the suggestions and the corrections if opted for by the school can improve their employee selection and ensure they have the best employee working for the betterment of the organization.
However, the success of the interview depends much on the quality of relationship process applied by the interviewer in the process of the conversation. As this process helps the interviewer maintain his natural self, the client gets comfortable ambience of self exposure and the narration becomes easier than in a normal question-answer format. Even then, the quality of the questions plays a great role in determining the outcome.
References
Agyei, I. T., & Christopher, O. (2016). Impact of recruitment and selection criteria on organizational performance: Insight from the public basic education sector. International Journal of Management Research and Reviews, 6(3), 323-334. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1786453235?accountid=1611
Burmeister, A., & Deller, J. (2016). A practical perspective on repatriate knowledge transfer. Journal of Global Mobility, 4(1), 68-87. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1784194485?accountid=1611
Bock, L. (2015). Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead. Hachette UK.
DeCenzo, D. A., Robbins, S. P & Verhulst, S. L. (2016). Fundamentals of Human Resource Management, Binder Ready Version. US: John Wiley & Sons.
