by Meaghan Williams

Created on: June 20, 2009

Often, the most qualified person is overlooked due to their lack of personality but sometimes, those who are not extremely outgoing are the hardest workers. Because they are not going to work to make friends or socialize, they are more likely to invest their time at work wisely. While traditional interview processes favor those with the gift of gab or those born with favorable looks, others actually possess the proper skill set to complete the job effectively and efficiently. A better way to interview would be to extend the interview process to include an unpaid trial period, but most employers cannot or will not invest the time or resources to execute such a rigorous interview process. On the other side of that style of interview, the interviewee might not have the ability to take the time off their current employment to engage in this style of interview. The benefit of having a trial period would allow the employer to assess ability and the potential employee would be able to see if they would enjoy the nature of the work. Because the interview is mostly conversational and very brief, day-to-day tasks and other important aspects of the job are overlooked. These could be tasks could be cause for the potential employee to quit shortly after accepting the position. In some cases, the potential employee could decline an offer for the position in the first place once they are aware of such tasks.

Currently, the interview process is one-sided and very much based on first impressions. First-time interviewers may lack the skills to determine whether a person is a good fit for the job or if that person is at all trainable if the position requires a certain amount of training. Some people have interviewed so frequently and have had the privilege of experiencing many different interview styles that they shine in the interview and are offered the position only to be discovered as incompetent months down the line, thus leaving the employer worse off than originally presumed.

Another group of people that are negatively affected by the traditional interview are those who lack career experience and recent graduates. Occasionally, this demographic offers the freshest insight and can absorb and develop quickly because they have not yet been able to form an opinion about work environments. Others who have worked before, come with a clouded perspective and are less likely to assimilate as quickly and easily as those not having as much experience. In a sense, those novice employees have not been spoiled or ruined by a previous work experience.

What is most unfortunate is that the potential employer may never know the gem they could employ because those people with significant aptitude did not stand out in the interview. A harsh reality is that people get nervous, people have bad days, people have other life issues that could cause them to be distracted during the interview process. Because we are all human and we have all experienced good and bad days, the traditional interview process lacks empathy and a real evaluation of pure ability to complete the tasks.

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