What makes a great job interview?

[John K]

Second layer: for those of you who have conducted job interviews, what are you looking for? What are things that you do at the person interviewing? What have you observed people who are being interviewed that you liked or disliked?

Depends on the job so much. Interviewing for graduate trainee entry is completely different to interviewing for a supervisors job for example. I spent most of my working life as a manager in a Pharma IT department supporting Research scientists. We could afford to pay well so we were quite picky. My experience is that a lot of people with very good technical skills don't really understand what's needed from them in many jobs and it shows up in their applications even before they are asked to come for interview. We simply took for granted that the people we chose to interview were really on the ball technically - we checked them out of course but that doesn't take much interviewing effort. What we really valued were very good technicians who could demonstrate good interpersonal skills, with examples from their previous experience, and we spent a lot of time exploring that with them. For the more senior positions, we looked for people who came back at us in the same kind of way - who were looking at us in the way we looked at them. The interview was very much to do with the questions they asked, and how they asked them, as much how they answered our questions. When things went really well with someone we almost forgot it was an interview and it felt more like a peer discussion on issues that really mattered to us - that was a sure tell we were on to a winner, someone who would slip seamlessly into a senior position in the team and who was a potential senior manager eventually.

Recruiting junior staff was obviously not as intense as that, but we'd still take their technical ability pretty much for granted with a few checks - we wanted evidence from their interests and extracurricular activities that they were a team player if they hadn't already had experience employed on a team.

One of the biggest mistakes we could make was recruiting very high technical ability with very poor interpersonal skills. There are jobs for people with that sort of profile, but not with us and they could cause a lot of disruption if misplaced.

 

[Jopetzki]

I succeed by being verbally fluent and confident. I speak matter-of-factly, and I hold strong eye contact. I just need a bit of narcissistic tinge to my verbal palette, and it all works out - terrific it is.