The SoapVox

Handy points in his blog to this post by Seth Godin about The end of the job interview, and it’s a very interesting post, that happens to match with a few thoughts I’ve had over time about the subject…that makes Godin smart, right? :)

Seth mentions the fact that job interviews are a waste of time, and really don’t manage to tell the people doing the hiring a thing about the prospective employee…and the prospective employee learns nothing about the prospective employer either.

I haven’t been to a job interview in many years (I’m an independent consultant), but I do remember back when I did go to interviews that they seemed like an absolute waste of time. I mean, I never learned anything new about the company I was interviewing for (I used to do my research before an interview), and I don’t really think the interviewer learned much useful info about me, besides the fact that I’m an articulate person who can hold himself in any conversation, specially one about any of my interests (tech, history, books,…). What else can an interviewer learn about an interviewee in an hour or two or even three?

I’ve done my share of interviews, mostly for clients that want to hire IT personal and pay me to do the selection for them, and…I never learned a thing about the person during said interviews, at least not during those conducted with the “help” of an HR flunky. On the other hand, I did do “tech interviews”, much like one of the things Seth proposes. I grab the prospective employee and put him to work on something that is needed, for real, at the moment, and observe how s/he works, and what results s/he accomplishes. In the end, I always tried to hire the person who gave the best results during the work time, without care for the HR interview…I mean…I’m a geek, hiring techs for a company…I don’t care if he can’t look me in the eye, I care if he can look apache in the eye and make it obey! :)

Creating a DVD tour for prospective employees as Seth proposes sounds to me like a great idea. Never mind the stupid PR/sales stuff (unless that’s what you are hiring for)…make a presentation about each type of area (tech, external customer service, internal customer service and so on) and let the other employees, the ones that will be the new guy’s partners in crime tell him or her how things are and what s/he can look forward to…that’d be a much better recruiting tool, IMNSHO, than an HR drone talking about what a great company this is.

So…are job interviews useful or just a waste of time?

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