The benefits of internships for recruiting

Several of my friends recently completed their studies and have been going for job interviews over the summer.  They all seem to follow a similar format, which I’m sure you’re familiar with.  You send off your CV and if you’re lucky enough to get through to the interview stage are invited in to meet the company.

At this stage it’s often a one hour interview where you meet your future boss and perhaps someone from the human resources team.  The interview often seems to rest on whether they like you or not as it’s pretty hard to determine in such a short space of time how capable you are or whether you’d work well with the team.  I recently read the book by Ricardo Semler in which he suggests that the candidate should be interviewed by the team that would be working with them. Alas this is the exception rather than the rule.

Interviews are a bit like a first date.  Do they share my interests?  Is there a connection?  What’s the chemistry like?  People put on a good show to make the right impression.  The standard “what is your weakness?” question for instance.  Who’s actually going to answer that accurately? Likewise most of the other standard questions (“why should I hire you?”, “How would you describe yourself?” etc.) will be met with well rehearsed answers.  They won’t reveal the real person behind the canned response.  You get a performance rather than the reality and as a result interviews provide little indication of whether a candidate is suitable or not.

Contrast that with the experience I’ve had with my internship.  Not only does the CMI get to see exactly how capable I am but they also get to see how my personality fits in with the team here and of course the other stakeholders outside of the Institute.  And they get all this for free.  In return I get to see how things work here, whether I get on well with the team, whether I like the way things operate and so on.  It’s a great opportunity for both sites to suss one another out to see whether permanent employment is the best way to go for both the employer and employee.

Obviously not all recruitment processes can involve an internship so what can be done to improve recruitment?  Allen Huffcutt has researched this and he suggests flipping the interview process on its head by asking very structured questions first.  Questions along the lines of “what would you do in…” that test their response to a particular situation.  

This format has been implemented by many of the banks.  A friend of mine had to fill out pages and pages of questions of that style, as well as illustrating times in her life when she felt she had demonstrated certain qualities.  It is a time consuming process but one that I believe gives a better quality assessment, leading to interview only if they feel you would fit in and be happy within the company.  The interview can then run on the broader ‘first date’ style questions but at least they have a bit of background and a wider base of information about your personality and your way of approaching things, this makes it an altogether more worthwhile process, for both parties.