Looking through portals for professionals such as Linkedin or Goldenline, as well as daily opening my e-mail box I conclude that summer is a very intense period for HR departments and recruitment agencies. Number of job advertisements for both administrative staff, professionals as well as for managerial positions is really significant. About how to stand out in the crowd of job ads and receive an application from the right people, I wrote in May 2014. Today I want to raise the subject of job interview – still the most popular recruitment tool (I wrote about psychometric tests in August and September 2014). In particular, I wanted to look at the issue of questioning. Recruitment interview usually covers three areas:

• professional and factual (work experience, career progress, tasks performed in previous work, factual knowledge, achievements, career goals);
• incentive (ambitions, aspirations, sources of motivation);
• personality (psychological predispositions).

The main emphasis is usually on the first area. While preparing the questions you should consider whether their content and form will allow you to achieve real and desired information about a person recruited. Direct questions, like: Are you flexible? and questions about the expectations of a candidate, like: What are your career plans? won?t give you more information on whether a person has the desirable skills and is able to use them. In this case, you should ask questions about specific behavior in the past. The principle of conducting such interview shows the STAR model: Situation – specific situation, which took place at work, Task – a task that has been entrusted to do, Action – specific actions that have been taken to complete a task, Result – assessment of implementation of actions in retrospect. Example: Describe a situation when you had to achieve a difficult goal. What was difficult in it? What concrete actions you took to realize it? What were the effects of these actions? Thanks so posed the questions you can obtain reliable information on how the candidate’s work, which then you should collate with the job profile drawn up beforehand. During an interview, of course, you shouldn?t forget about the ambitions and career plans of the candidate, but this information is of lesser importance.   Graphic credit: www.suggestkeyword.com/Z3JhcGhpY3MgcXVpeg/