Hearing their experiences has been quite depressing. It's made me ask myself it we should have mystery candidates, in the same way that shops employ mystery shoppers.
Bad interviews
These are just a few. How do you know that your standards are better than this? We have ‘mystery shoppers’ perhaps it’s time to have ‘mystery candidates’.One candidate was sat aghast while her interviewers argued amongst themselves about the position. They hadn’t even agreed what it was, and this was the second interview.
They were over a week late getting back to her.
Poor skills
Another candidate was told he would be asked competence-based questions and was asked questions that didn’t really apply to the job, and weren’t competence-based questions.
He did his best to build some rapport with the people interviewing him as they walked to the room, but the interviewer seemed to be lacking in any social skills.
Poor administration
A third candidate was told that the final decision would be made in a meeting of all the assessors at the end of the day. Yet, before that meeting took place, she was told she hadn’t got the post. We discovered they had appointed the internal candidate.
Another organisation, ‘did not have time’ to update the job descriptions and person specifications so ended up recruiting people into senior posts who did not have the required skills.
These are just a few recent examples.
Bad questions
As part of my training in how to be interviewed I have a section on how to answer really bad interview questions. They are the ones that people who have not been trained properly on how to interview tend to ask. Things like:
“Why should we give you this job?”
“If you were in a lift and saw a member of staff acting in a way that is against our diversity policy, what would you do?”
I keep hoping I will be able to leave this section out, but unfortunately it’s still necessary to prepare candidates.
Why these questions are so bad
Just in case you are wondering why these questions are so bad, here’s an outline:
“Why should we give you this job?”
Your objective in an interview is to find out if the individual has the skills and behaviours to do the job. You have only a limited time to do that. You need to spend that time gathering useful information that will enable you to make a decision.
This question is perfect for those with the “gift of the gab”. They will be able to impress you with their clever answers. However, these are often not the people who do a good job. There are lots of other questions that will give you much more reliable information.
“If you were in a lift and saw a member of staff making racist comments, what would you do?”
This is a hypothetical question, so the reliability of the answer is very low. If you want to know whether someone could handle a situation like this, ask
“Have you ever seen a member of staff making racist comments? “
If they say they have, then:
“What did you do?”
If they have not been in this position, you could ask them what they would do, but remember, this is just what they think they would do (or what they think you would like to hear). It’s not reliable.
These examples are all real and give a very bad impression to candidates. Make sure it’s not happening in your organisation. For more help with questions, see our booklet "Questions Made Easy"
You can get some help in recruitment here in our booklet "How to Interview Successfully"
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