Recruiters and Interview Sessions Are Getting Tougher Now-a-days

How many leaves do you see in the tree outside? How many people in your batch wear spectacles? How many steps have you climbed on the way to this office? Baffled? Zapped? Don't get puzzled, Career News brought the issue to let you notify about the present scenario of what is going on recruiter's mind.

Wait…there’s more. When CEO, MyInsuranceClub.com was recruiting at a premier B-school, he asked, ‘how does your institute’s logo look like?’ He adds, “The candidate must have looked at the logo a thousand times, but never really bothered to look very closely at it.

He was dumfounded ofcourse!” Yohannan didn’t stop grilling though. He asked the same candidate (who got shortlisted for five other companies) to elaborate on any one of the prospective company’s logo? “This had to be the worst interview session in that candidate’s life, as he experienced several embarrassing blanks throughout. The point I am trying to make is that, the question doesn’t need to be weird; it can be the most simple question to un-settle you and from then on, it’s anybody’s guess which way the interview can go,” adds Yohannan. You may wonder how do the answers to the above questions influence a recruiter’s decision. But clearly, we all know that they aren’t entirely insignificant because those questions are being asked by employers to gauge competencies and skills, vital for the job, right?

Dr. Shalini Sarin, director – HR, Schneider Electric India says, “Employers want to see how well the candidate can think on his/her feet. Sometimes, they just want to see if he/she gets rattled. Often, it is only to test one’s creativity or sense of humour. In creating stress and by asking a weird question, the interviewer may be testing how well the person would respond to stressful situations at the workplace.”

In a different interview setting, candidates were asked to express their opinions on the increasing significance of brain drain and Yohannan was a part of the discussion. While most candidates kept harping on the need for better facilities and the lack of government grants for research, etc to keep the best brains in our country, one of them blurted, ‘It considerably increases the marriage prospects of those who have moved abroad’ as one of the key reasons! Yohannan says, “And from there on, a very serious discussion was won over by just looking at the problem from a very non-traditional point of view. Yes, the candidate got selected!” Taxing?

It is evident that India Inc, in an endeavour to hire the best, is resorting to innovative ways of interviewing candidates and gauging their capabilities. “The people are competing across the globe today and hence, one needs to prepare oneself for handling situations, which are unknown and even of an imaginary nature, where the person’s ability and potential can be assessed and measured,” says Harpreet Kaur, senior GM and head – HR, Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd. The core model behind Hutchison 3 Global Services (H3GS)’s recruitment strategy is the competency-based hiring methodology, which is buffered with certain psychometric tests. In order to identify a candidate’s skills, they play a battery of audio clips of a customer call and ask the candidate for their response to that situation. Ashfaq ul Ahad, VP, recruitment, Hutchison 3 Global Services says, “This enables us to assess how the candidate will react to these situations in ‘real’ time. Another example here is a story reconstruction exercise where the candidates are given a written story about a customer’s problem. Candidates have to identify the customer’s situation and come up with a suitable response.” Ahad gives a word of caution, “Most of these programmes thrive on behaviour-based responses, which are only predictive in nature and can reasonably prove 90-92 per cent congruent on any statistical test; this means that there is an almost 8-10 per cent inherent risk in such methods.” Baffling?

For certain lateral positions at 3i Infotech, job seekers are grilled at the technical stage itself. The questions may require answers, which are technical solutions to the problem but they demand innovative thinking. In roles like training or sales, etc, the individual is required to deliver a short presentation or training module on a given topic. Certain roles, which are clientfacing require the ability to deal with pressure. Here, at 3i Infotech, the client is involved during the interview process and the candidate is put through a gruelling round of technical, business scenario questions and evaluated accordingly. Such questions bring out analytical thinking, creative abilities and crisis-handling traits, they believe. At Godrej & Boyce, they do follow unique approaches in the selection process, which is carried out for candidates. For middle to senior management recruitment and leadership development process, the selection process comprises of assessment centers based on the leadership competencies identified by the organisation. These assessment centers comprise of various tools and exercises like role plays, case studies, etc over and above the psychometric profiling. These days, recruiters refrain from asking dated questions like ‘where do you see yourself five years from now?’. Employers today want to make the most of the time in hand and you have to be prepared to shine through!

courtesy : ascent, Times