Careers psychologist Sinéad Brady talks to Colm about new interview styles and methods, and how traditional job interviews can lead to some great candidates being overlooked. Listen back above.
The John Lewis Partnership has come up with a novel solution to help job prospective employees perform to the best of their ability in interviews. The UK retail giant has decided to publish interview questions online in a bid to help job applicants avoid being tripped up by nerves. Careers psychologist Sinéad Brady spoke to Colm Ó Mongáin on Today with Claire Byrne about the benefits of this strategy particularly to neurodiverse candidates; and other recent developments in interview styles and methods.
Sinéad welcomes the action by John Lewis as a positive step. She says the company have put a lot of thought into catering for applicants to a variety of roles across the organisation. The careers psychologist says that anyone looking to copy the John Lewis technique will need to put in time and effort to come up with a similar strategy:
"John Lewis is a massive retailer, so this is the output of a wider neuro-inclusion policy. Organisations looking on will have a lot of ground work to do before you would get to the point where you are beginning to publish your interview questions, because they have a massive neuro-inclusion policy."
This new measure at John Lewis is the result of a wider consultation process the company has undertaken across the UK, Sinéad says:
"They work with ranges of different organisations across the UK and partner with them, to make sure that they are recruiting the right people into the right roles and across all of the different age brackets and genders and people from ranges of different backgrounds that sometimes find it difficult to find roles within organisations."
Colm mentions a former colleague who was brilliant at their job, but who admitted to finding interviews very difficult, and Sinéad says this is quite common. She says there is now a large body of research that shows very little correlation between interview performance and suitability for a given job:
"We’ve got about 100 years of research on this now, that there’s actually limited predictive validity for interviews with performance. And what that means is, the person who performs really well at interview, won’t necessarily be the best person for the job."
The careers psychologist says there can be a mismatch between the skills measured in the traditional interview and the ability to do the job on a daily basis:
"In the vast majority of roles, interviews don’t map very well on to what you do day-to-day. So yes, we need to be good at having a conversation with people, we need to be able to communicate with team members, absolutely. But interviews don’t predict that very well."
Companies are changing their recruitment strategies to eliminate candidates who perform much better in interviews than they do in the actual role. These strategies can also help businesses to embrace applicants who don’t do well in 'regular’ interviews, but who have the potential to become great employees. These candidates, who are often neurodiverse, can find certain aspects of a traditional job interview overwhelming:
"Things, for example, like eye contact can be a very difficult thing for people that are neurodiverse. Making small talk can be a very challenging thing to do, or interpreting body language. Again, they are all really challenging things to do, as well as thinking on the spot."
Sinéad says that businesses don’t want to miss out on hiring talented candidates who ‘failed’ in past interviews, because they didn’t get sufficient opportunity to display their relevant skills:
"You could have people who are really, really brilliant problem solvers, really really brilliant critical thinkers. But you put them under pressure in an interview whereby they are expected to make eye contact, expected to make small talk and interpret body language; but actually their ability to critically think is almost consumed by having to think about those other things."
The careers psychologist says that basing a hiring decision on an interview alone often just measures how good a candidate is at doing interviews, and not much more:
"We’re judging people all by the same standard in an interview. It’s this ability to engage in conversation across a table under pressure, for the most part."
Sinéad talks about some of the new methods recruiters are using to avoid the pitfalls of the traditional face-to-face interview; such as situational judgement tests and multiple mini-interviews. You can hear more in the full interview above.
Listen back to more great interviews, news, sport and culture on Today with Claire Byrne here.