Being Interviewed and Being Assessed
Not all interviews are the same, and not just because the interviewer is different and the company is different. There are also differences in interview styles and format.
Interview formats include telephone interviews, face-to-face interviews, and online interviews. The first two are the most common formats, but interviews via video conferencing or Internet conferencing are not unheard of. Each of these interview formats also has variations. On some telephone interviews, you talk with one person and on some you are engaging in a conference call. A face-to-face interview may involve one face, or several faces in sequence, or several faces at one time. The same variations can occur within video or Internet interviews.
Regardless of the interview format, the interview style may be one of the three most common:
” Traditional - Focuses on gathering information about you. Questions ask you for factual answers or to state a philosophy or principal. The goal of the traditional interview is to learn about your past, to validate the information learned from your resume, and to assess your philosophical “fit.”
” Behavioral - Focuses on discovering your competencies and how you behave in common business situations. Questions often ask you to describe what you did in a particular type of situation or ask you to predict what you might do. The goal of the behavioral interview is to predict your future performance and assess your work style “fit…”
” Combination - Explores both past experience and future performance. This style is not uncommon when interviews are done by several people in sequence or when you go to a series of interviews over a period of time.
Each of these styles of interviews asks differing types of questions. Many of these questions, however, are common to nearly every interview of one certain type.
