Seth Godin: The end of the job interview. Hear hear.
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Great article. I hate interviewing and usually do a 2 minute interview after talking to them on the phone at length (the real interview) and people I know who know them.
The idea of having them work for a day … or half day is much better.
I love Seth’s stuff, but he’s way off in orbit on this one. It would be a lovely idea if everyone was a self-employed, name-their-own-schedule, Web-2.0-mobile-warrior-wifi g0dzor, but in the real world, people already have jobs and have to scrape time together to take interviews for new ones.
I’m self-employed now (take that interviewing angst!) but one of the last interviews I went on the company did the part about having the interviewee sit down and do some “test work”. I’m a typesetter by trade, so the “test” was to create newspaper advertisements with text provided in the time allotted. The office cat kept harassing me the entire time, so I had already decided not to take the job if offered. Four days later all of the ads I created appeared in the local paper. This company got a few weeks of free “live” work out of their applicants. That didn’t set well with me, especially since they didn’t indicate we were working on live jobs.
Years ago I did an interview for some web development contract work of an ‘ahem’ adult nature (they were the only ones making any money online at the time). Anyways it became apparent after a few minutes he was just trying to get problems with his websites fixed at the expense of the candidates. I told him I wasn’t feeling like we had a match with the position and left. I later found out from the recruiter he had done this with every candidate and had apparently had no plans of actually hiring anyone!
There will always be the unscrupulous business that tries to get free labor, but the process Seth described is beneficial to a serious candidate, even if it means giving up a couple weekends and some freebie work. Two things happen: one, you take away the ridiculous q&a that doesn’t let the interviewer know what they want to know about you; and two, you get to find out what work conditions are really like at the employer’s place of business. How many jobs have you taken where what you were sold in the interview wasn’t anywhere near what you actually got? Unless you’re working at McDonalds, the interviewer is trying to unrealistically sell you on the job and isn’t going to be forthcoming about the bipolar boss you’re about to inherit. I would love to see the death of, “If you were an animal, what animal would you be?”
Matt ..
We did this by accident about 25 years ago and gained one of our most knowledgeable support employees.
The story: A young man took a clerical-content job with one of our customers just after he graduated from high school. He studied everything he could get his hands on, including the source code for the system we vended and our customer deployed. In time, the customer learned of his independently gained expertise and asked the young man to write one or two small job control procedure files and one or two FORTRAN programs. He completed his assignments, but the customer did not have an opening for someone with his capability. In time, he outgrew the clerical-content job and inquired of us about working on the product.
During the young man’s interview with our support department manager, the manager took an urgent call. Out of habit, he used his speaker phone. The candidate listened to the customer’s description of the problem, signaled the manager that he could offer a solution, then black-boarded it. The manager talked the customer through the candidate’s solution.
End result: The candidate had an offer at many multiples of his then current pay in hand when he left the office. It didn’t take him long to wrap up his affairs in his home city and move to our location. He was productive immediately and for a long time.
Epilogue: While he worked for us, the young man studied everything he could get his hands on about the hardware / operating system platform we used at the time. When the company re-organized in bankruptcy and he was laid off, he asked for a practical interview with our hardware vendor and had an offer in hand at the end of that day, also.
DJSloan/Houston
This approach is fine when you have a single person, say for a management job, and you want to work out if they are the right person are not. It is somewhat less effective when you are trying to fill a job and there are (say) five applicants. What happens then? Do you have five full-time employees dedicated to babysitting applicants as an alternative to interviews?