Personnel Selection and Talent

Management (BMAN24362)

Job interviews: Applied lecture

Dr. Andra Toader

andra.toader@manchester.ac.uk
AMBS West room 7.011a
 The selection process

Organizational Needs Analysis

Job Analysis

Job description & Person specification: Job Criteria

Structured Interview
Identify selection criteria & choose assessment
methods
 Job analysis

• Identifies
– Critical effective behaviors needed on the job
– Ineffective behaviors which should be avoided
– Key competencies
• Accomplished through
– Interviewing key persons (job holders, peers, leaders)
• End-result: Criteria used in
– Selection
– Performance assessment
 Example behaviors identified
in job analysis

• Tells employees what they need to achieve (objectives) and

how to achieve their objectives
• Delegates responsibilities based on people’s skills and
abilities
• Schedules tasks
• Distributes the resources needed for accomplishing the job

Criterion: Planning and organizing

 Example behaviors identified
in job analysis
• Makes difficult decisions with regard to employees,
customers, senior leaders
• Takes unpopular decisions if needed (e.g., budget cuts,
stopping a project, demoting people, rejecting ideas which are
infeasible)
• Responds fast and accurately under pressure (e.g., when firm
faces nascent competition, employees do unethical deeds,
customers back down from deal)
• Intervenes immediately when dealing with people or
performance related problems (e.g., team falling behind on
work, discrimination in the workplace, bad annual employee
survey results)

Criterion: Decisiveness and risk taking

 Designing the interview

• Now you know what post occupant needs to do

(criteria)
• You need to find out if the candidates have
engaged in behaviors that reflect these criteria in
their past jobs or if hypothetically they are able
to do this
• Enter interview question design to capture
criteria fulfillment
 The structured interview

Structured
Interviews

Behavioral Situational
Interview Interview

past-oriented questions future-oriented questions

 Behavioral questions

• Situation: When was the criterion applied

– E.g. Tell me about a situation when you had to
delegate responsibilities in your team
• Actions: What did the candidate do
– Tell us a bit about who was involved, which
responsibilities did you delegate, and what were your
criteria for delegating them (e.g., skills, abilities)
• Results: What were the effects of the action
– What were the results of this delegation? Did people
perform well in their job, what were the results?
 Situational question

• Put candidates in hypothetical, but job-relevant situation

• Describe future behavior, or behavioral intentions
• What would you do if?
• How to go about?
– Criterion: decisiveness (people need to respond fast and
accurate under pressure)
– Think about an example where this may apply for leadership
(e.g., customer wants to withdraw from deal)
– Put it into a story: describe vividly why this happened, potential
causes, parties involved
– Ask: How would you go about solving this problem?
 Situational question
• Criterion: Decisiveness (responds fast under pressure,
takes unpopular decisions, makes difficult decisions)
• Describe the hypothetical situation:
– One of your devoted customers has just announced that
they will move to another firm. You have been informed
that this occurred because their orders have been delayed
over the past two months and two order receipts had the
wrong sums on them. The employees work in shifts and no
one knows who was responsible for this. What would you
do to retain this customer?
• Target behaviors responses related to
– Customer retention
– Sanctioning deviant behavior/increasing efficiency
 Evaluating responses: BARS

• Criteria show what needs to be done

– E.g. Decisiveness: Responds fast and accurately
under pressure
• Identify which kinds of behaviors may show this
– E.g. deals promptly with customer complaints
– Diffuse conflict in the team
– Makes better offer to customers before competition
– Punishes deviant behavior immediately etc.
• Define the scale
 Evaluating responses: BARS
• Create the rating scale anchored with behaviors
– High decisiveness: Has a track record of attracting and
retaining customers as revealed through repeated collaboration
and reputation mark; team effectively performed at and above
target; managed deviant behavior effectively through reporting
and role modeling when it appeared
– Moderate decisiveness: Attracts and retains an above average
number of customers; minor complaints from customer resolved
effectively but some customers have been lost; team performs
above average, although there have been minor cases where
team underperformed; some deviant behavior was unreported
and unsanctioned
– Low decisiveness: Is not able to respond to customer requests
and complaints in a timely manner; was not able to retain
customers for more than one collaboration; reputation among
customers very low; team consistently is below target; deviant
behavior is widespread, no action is taken against it
 Other criteria: Personality
• Personality
– Think about the criteria for this position
– Which traits are helpful for accomplishing the criteria
(e.g., Big 5 facets)
 Other criteria: Intelligence
• Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory:
– Quantitative knowledge (e.g., mathematical)
– Reading and writing
– Comprehension (e.g., vocabulary, oral fluency)
– Fluid reasoning (e.g., inductive/deductive, speed of
reasoning)
– Short-term memory
– Long-term memory
– Visual processing (e.g., visualization, rotation, visual
memory)
– Auditory processing (e.g., memory for sounds, musical
discrimination)
– Processing speed (e.g., how fast you perceive things,
how fast you respond to questions, reading/writing speed)
Other criteria: Interests
 Other criteria: Interests
• Realistic:
– Doers; assertive and competitive, and are interested in activities requiring motor
coordination, skill and strength
• Investigative:
– Thinkers; think and observe rather than act, organize and understand information
rather than persuade
• Artistic:
– Creators; creative, open, inventive, original, perceptive, sensitive, independent
• Social
– Helpers; work with people to satisfy their needs in teaching or helping situations
• Enterprising
– Persuaders; work with people and data; good talkers, use this skill to lead or
persuade others; also value reputation, power, money and status
• Conventional
– Organizers; work with data; like rules and regulations and emphasize self-
control; like structure and order, dislike unstructured or unclear work; place value
on reputation, power, or status
 Criteria are not enough:
Interviewer bias

• Criteria, structured questions, and evaluations

provide a pathway towards an objective
selection
• Biases may still creep in. What can these be
caused by?
– Gender, race, age?
– Likability?
– Body language?
• Think in general about what can cause
interviewers to be less objective