Job interviews – the clue is in the question

By Dr Kay Guccione, Head of Research Culture and Researcher Development and Co-Director of the Lab for Academic Culture.

Within the boundaries of everyday policies and processes there can be bags of space to innovate. Just because things have evolved in a certain way, doesn’t mean they have to continue to be that way. Instead of doing things the way we see others do it, or emulating how we ourselves went through a particular process, what might we adjust and improve on? Small increments matter, and as managers and team leaders we have the power to drive change in a way that shouldn’t be dismissed.

It’s important to us in the Research Culture and Researcher Development Team that we have an ‘attitude of enquiry’ (as one colleague recently put it) or an ‘ethos of enhancement’ (as another colleague said) or as you may know it, a critical reflective approach to continual improvement. We do like to ask ourselves ‘is this working, and who is it working for?’ and ‘is there evidence we can use to shape how we work’. This attitude could be applied anything we do in the workplace, from our design and delivery work in researcher education, to how we manage the flow of our procurement processes, to how we recruit and welcome new colleagues, to our process for keeping our web pages updated, to being mindful of waste and sustainability, to running engaging team meetings, to PDR conversations, and to our approach to managing cross-team projects.

This year we’ve made some small changes to the transparency of job interviews that are get big results and enthusiastically positive feedback. I wanted to share this with you as something that is probably quite easily within your reach.

Sending interview topics in advance

Have you ever had that job interview panic of preparing pages and pages of answers to questions you may possibly be asked? Of memorising information from reports and websites just in case you are asked about it? In that pre-interview period, it feels like such an anxious, frustrating waste of time to work in this way. Multiply that by several interviews per person, or several candidates per interview and you’ve wasted quite a lot of people’s time and energy.

That is if the interviewee is lucky enough to have the extra time and energy to give to this level of intense preparation. Parents, carers, folks with a tight energy budget due to illness or disability, those with other big commitments in their life (music, sport, volunteering) etc, will be disadvantaged. Additionally, for those of us who don’t thrive in uncertainty, have different or disordered executive functioning and decision making, or experience periods of anxiety and burnout related to lack of clarity, this can have a significant health toll.

Our change to practice has been a simple as changing the ‘Invitation to Interview’ email, to ensure we are:

• Sending the question ‘topic areas’ out in advance. Mapping to the most vital parts of the person specification we are working from, we send all candidates a list of interview topics. We don’t send the precise questions because we know that it will then throw people off track if we then paraphrase that question on the day. For example, for our Research Culture Manager post we said:
  
  “There will be one question from the panel related to each of the following topic areas. We will ask you to draw on your own experiences and give examples from your practice within your answer. Topic areas:

• Your aspirations for the role.
• Project management and prioritisation.
• Partner engagement and management.
• Team leadership.
• Strategic communication.
• Negotiation and influencing.
• Evaluating and reporting impact.”

• Communicating the timings. Noting the length of the interview, the number of the questions there will be and therefore how long an answer we are expecting, helps preparation. It also helps us manage our interview timings. No more cutting people off in the middle of a long ramble, no more running out of time to ask the last few questions creating unfair comparisons between candidates. Sound good? For example, for the Research Culture Manager post, we said:
  
  “After the 5min presentation, there will be 30min of questions. There will be 7 questions, plus time for you to offer us additional information, and then time for you to ask questions of us, so we are looking for roughly 2-3 min answers to each question. There are no right answers we just want to hear about your experiences and ideas.”

• Helping people to visualise the space. For example we included text that said:“Interviews will be held in [building / room]. This is an accessible step free venue. Please report to reception on arrival. You will be shown to a quiet waiting area with seats, and an accessible toilet nearby. We will collect you to travel a short distance to the interview room. Candidates may use their choice of PowerPoint presentation/paper handout. PowerPoint presentations are to be brought on the day, on a memory stick, and as a backup may be emailed to [address] by 5pm the day before the interview. There will be space to present from a standing or seated position, and microphones will be available in the room. We welcome to you to be in touch if you wish to discuss personalised accessibility support.”

Is this a bit more work? Marginally (not for you lucky people, just copy/adapt ours!). Do we get the best out of our interviewees and recruit the best person for the role? Absolutely!

Frequently asked questions

• Who exactly is benefiting? Everyone really. Using this kind of universal design, we offer every candidate a better experience. Interviewers benefit certainly, we get calmer, more confident candidates to choose from.

• Don’t you lose spontaneity? Not that I have noticed, there is still space to respond and react and relaxed people can think and communicate more clearly with less blurting and oversharing. Making time to close the interview by asking ‘what didn’t we ask you, that you want us to know?’ makes active space for the uniqueness of the candidates to shine through.

• How do you test if people can ‘think on their feet’? In my job context, the role will very infrequently require an on-the-spot memory test, or split-second decision making. It will often require the postholder to make considered decisions. If being able to ‘think on their feet’ is integral to the job, you can add a question about it to the topic areas.

• Doesn’t it mean all the answers are the same? Not in my experience. People are still drawing on their own experiences, examples, and viewpoints.

• Don’t people Google it? Don’t we all Google for good ways to give interview answers? I hope my future teammates will indeed have the skills to complete desktop research to find good practice in performing at interview. All we are doing is focussing the topics of the Google searches. They still need to apply their learning to examples and evidence from their own real lives. It’s still always obvious to the panel if an answer isn’t grounded in real experience.

So, what do you think? Will you use these ideas? Do you have wiggle room to change something for the better? If so, please share it with us!