Analytical Interview: Are HR Professionals ready for it?

Show us if you can really play.

Gone are the days when kings, leaders, landlords, chefs, merchants, masters and captains of ship used to recruit their employees only after adequately ensuring that candidates have required skills to perform tasks. Examination used to be quick, tough and very thorough, thus debarring unskilled or unfit candidates from further request for an employment. Candidates were asked to prove themselves by showing what actually they can do or perform (i. e. through action) and not just claiming verbally. Haven’t you heard a story in which a sorrowing king promises that he would let the lucky young man marry his daughter (of course a young and gorgeous princess) who could rescue her from clutches of a mightily witch living in a spooky castle in high mountains?

Apart of good qualification, personality and etiquettes; getting truly skilled and proficient employees is a great challenge for every employer - let it be running business in any domain and part of world. Job interview is the only available window through which an employer or recruitment officers can ‘look into’ potential employees in a limited period of time. No other opportunity, other than an interview, can be sought to examine any person as a deserving candidate for a particular job. Thus interviewing becomes a difficult, elaborate and also tiresome task for most employers and human resource professionals.

Qualification is sufficient?

Conventional ‘question and answer’ interviews rely mostly on information provided by a candidate, the documents it submits to the scrutinizing authority and some few well-know or established nonverbal clues of authenticity. While verbal analysis remains limited to scrutiny of facts and figures only, nonverbal analysis provides us large spectrum of information about candidate being interviewed in real time. Why nonverbal scrutiny and checking body language is required after all? Never forget that actions and expressions are more genuine and profound than words.

Different nonverbal clues given away by a person being questioned can convey affective (emotional), cognitive, associative, physical and social statuses with varying degrees. However, many interviewers don’t have critical skills to obtain and analyze different nonverbal clues given away by a candidate being questioned. Hence it raises a great question about core purpose behind recruitment of skilled employees. Great responsibility of any employer or human resource personal is to find that where a candidate might fit itself well if sufficient evidences of its credibility are found.

"Companies which suffer from poor performance from an employee, actually lack skilled human resource professionals to pick able one."

While facial expressions only convey both genuine and fake emotional state of a candidate, most interviewers mostly rely on them only. Many seasoned and experienced HR professionals cannot collect and analyze different types of clues other than facial expressions so chances of getting false and misleading information become higher. Especially when patients and enthusiasm of interviewers gets challenged after multiple and long running interview sessions, they might take negative steps out of anger, boredom and frustration during interview. At many instances, truly skilled candidates are debarred whereas ‘smart’ ones easily get through due to their skills to hide certain clues from interviewers.

Asking good question is a great challenge.

Thus accurate collection of context specific nonverbal clues with respect to what kind of question is being asked becomes very important. True purpose of any recruitment procedure is not just to authenticate information being provided by candidates during screening but also to understand affective (emotional), cognitive, associative, physical and social clues given by them and try to co-relate those clues with facts and figures being shared. However, due to lack of required skillfulness in context specific (analytical) questioning, clue collecting and analyzing; conventional interviews cannot reveal information and clues required for further investigation of candidate’s true professional capabilities.

Looking at core issues related with scrutiny and authentication during recruitment, employers need to implement Analytical/Behavioral Interviewing Techniques and rigorously train their Human Resource officers to get skillful in them. Apart of standards established by analytical interviewing experts from other countries, local experts and researchers should be deployed to identify ethnic, social and cultural specific nonverbal clues that can give clear indications of authenticity of information being provided by candidates.

Finding, recruiting and also retaining is always a great challenge in front of employees and  establishments. Analytical interviewing could bring astonishing advantages to both interviewers and candidates because true purpose of it is finding what a candidate is exactly skillful in and compatible with. Hiring candidates based only upon clues like good eye contact, smile, hand shake and excellent verbal skills could prove 'costly' because it could hamper basic goals of any purposeful establishment which are better performance, efficiency, profitability and prosperity.

(Please contact with me by sending an email if you're really interested in working for Analytical Interviewing Techniques project in Indian perspective. We can work as a team.)

Related Articles:

1) My career saving lie detection 2) Face of a liar(?) 3) Inside Interrogation Room