The answer is yes, but it‘s not an absolute pre-requisite for good interviewing. It all depends on what we mean by ‘know’
the job. Actual experience of the job or supervising the job brings a certain bias with it, but is, nevertheless, enormously helpful. The task of the employment interview is to bring the character, experience and skills of the applicant and the requirements of the job together in a judgement.
To
have no knowledge of the job is to render the interview ineffective.Why is job knowledge so necessary? There are three main reasons, which are:
1 It tells the interviewer what questions to ask.
2 It enables the interviewer to assess the relevance of the appli- 3 It enables the interviewer to discuss the job with the appli-
cant’s career to the job in question.
cant.
This does not imply that interviewers must have experience of the job. There are other ways of obtaining job knowledge, the most common of which is job analysis. A detailed description of all the duties and responsibilities of a job can be obtained through analysis of the job and laid down in a job description.
The job description can then be given to the applicant. The problem with a written job description is that it may mean more to the applicant than it does to the interviewer, and is thus not too helpful to the latter in forming questions.
However, from a good job description a set of required knowl- edge, skills and abilities (KSA) can be derived for each duty or
responsibility.
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Knowledge - a recognized body of information that is required for successful performance in the job.
that is essential to the job.
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0 Skill - a competence with a measurable level of performance
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0 Ability - A more general capability.
There are four stages in transferring a job description into an aide for interviewing, which are:
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1 Job analysis produces a list of tasks.
2 Rate the tasks in order of importance.
3 Apply KSA to each task.
4 Decide which KSAs will influence selection.
Thus, the interviewer has a set of key KSAs at their disposal, but this approach does not directly translate into questions which will help distinguish good from poor.
Perhaps a more direct approach is to combine KSAs with a form of job analysis known as critical incident technique. The essence of critical incident technique is that people with expe- rience of a job identify 'incidents' and attach to them examples of good behaviour and poor behaviour. These incidents are more explicit descriptions of behaviour than the simple description of the task. A number of incidents can reflect one task. The key requirement here is a panel of expert people, who know the job through experience or supervision, to judge important incidents and justify good and bad examples.
An example might be useful here. Suppose the job in ques- tion is a Hotel Assistant Manager and you have already obtained a list of tasks and ranked them. One particular task has been identified, among others, as being a useful selector.
The task is handling individual guests in respect of personal credit and settling accounts. You now need to identify KSAs.
A critical incident exercise throws up an apposite incident: A maid reports to her supervisor that a room has been severely damaged with mirrors and furniture broken. The supervisor verifies this and reports it to the Assistant Manager. The guest is not due to check out for another day.
The first task of the team is to identify what the knowledge skill and ability are in respect of this incident. They would come up with something like:
0 Knowledge:
- The legal position;
- The insurance position, including assessment rules;
- Rules on credit and procedures;
- Current reservation situation.
- To analyse situations into information collection area;
.
Skill:- To be able to devise a set of alternative strategies based on - To be able to think through and anticipate client reac-
- Personal assertiveness;
- Recording formally what is required.
- A general ability to confront difficult social situations.
the information collected;
tions;
Ability:
Clearly this situation will revolve around information on client status, booking situation and damage assessment. The team should then be able to produce a range of examples of what would be good practice and bad practice. The final stage would be to translate this into a situational interview question. This might be either a straightforward ‘what would you do?’ or the more detailed ‘what information would you need to handle this incident?’ or ‘would you confront the client?’.
Given a set of tasks with KSAs attached to them, there are five stages to the procedure of developing something useful to the interviewer:
1 Through the experts, get examples of good and bad practice associated with each critical incident.
2 Allocate incidents to just one KSA that each best illustrates.
The process collects the incidents that are selected and rejects those that are not.
3 Translate the salient critical incidents into ‘situations’ which form the basis of a situational interview. These situations describe an important piece of behaviour in the job.
deal with them and those that would not. In the case of the latter, additional information has to be added to the situa- tion.
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The question attached to the situation is: ‘How would you ance as to what might constitute good and bad performance is required. To do this, the panel of experts has to create a4
Divide situations into those that would require experience to zI- 0 w
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range of answers. 3
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a aThe application of critical incident technique brings the dull
job content list to life. By creating situations which illustrate the degree to which an applicant has the relevant KSA, the interviewer gives him- or herself something concrete to assess.
One way or another, some knowledge of the job is required by the interviewee. The more realistic and ‘alive’ the knowledge, the more likely it is that the evaluation of the answers will move from ‘yes, they can do it’ to ‘yes, they will probably do it well’.
Forming questions, question types and strategies
Time is always a constraint in an interview, therefore it is not to be wasted. The technical goal of the interview is to get your- self into a position to answer four basic questions:
0 Can they do the job?
Would they do it well?
0 Will they fit in?
Are they motivated?
The situational interview places the emphasis on the job and asks: Can the applicant match up to good practice in this job?
The drawback is that the applicants are being invited to spec- ulate in a way which will make them look good on the basis of what they think the interviewer considers good practice. An alternative strategy is to work solely from the reality of the applicant‘s past. In other words, the strategy is to probe their previous employment in order to ascertain what the applicant
did.
This approach is applicant centred rather than prospective job centred.If probing the past is the strategy and there is the usual time constraint, then the style of question must be incisive without being intimidating.