Welcome to the fishbowl

Interview questions are changing. Techniques are being designed to catch you on the wrong foot. If you have been brought up on a diet of Job Interviews for Dummies and have successfully coped with the bigger dummies on the other side of the table, this may not be for you. But in today�s world, things are getting complicated. Interview questions have changed (see box). Techniques have been designed to catch you on the wrong foot. A crash course is in order.

A study by Career Directors International says �as employers face ever-mounting expenses surrounding hiring, training and staff turnover, coupled with higher than ever volumes of résumé submission, innovations are being introduced to make smarter hiring decisions, resulting in a better fit between positions and new hires�.

In HR, India has been keeping pace with the West; if anything, recruitment is a tougher proposition here. But don�t expect to find these techniques during an interview for a public sector bank job. You could encounter them in strange places � at the real estate company that is expecting you to sell premium condos, at the advertising agency that wants you to hawk fairness lotions to men, at the BPO that is buckling under a call centre crisis� This is where innovative interview techniques come into their own.

The Career Directors� survey lists several new twists to the traditional interview. Only some, however, need bother the jobseeker. The others are new mainly in name; cut the sizzle and you will end up with the same old steak.

The first of the new variety is the fishbowl interaction. �The only difference between the fishbowl and the case method is that the fishbowl is typically a group activity, and the case method interview is an individual case analysis,� says the report. �In the interview, jobseekers are asked to resolve a real-world business problem associated with the company. This requires the use of analytical skills, and an ability to both identify key business issues and present a structured problem-solving methodology with which to approach them.�

The second innovation is the puzzle interview. �With the expanding IT market, some companies, Microsoft included, have adopted creative outside-the- box strategies to identify the best candidates for a job,� says the report. �The puzzle interview is not a straightforward problem or question.�

To get to grips with the puzzle interview is a complicated affair. The report says you have to first determine whether the required answer type is monologue or dialogue. �Logic puzzles typically call for a monologue. A jobseeker is given limited information and is expected to find the solution without receiving further information. .. Open-ended questions are similar to Rorschach blots, and are purposely unstructured. The concept of this question is to generate one-half hour of conversation�� There is a lot more of this and it gets increasingly abstruse. Perhaps you need to rethink that interview call.

The third product of HR creativity is the speed interview. Says the report: �First there was speed dating and now there is speed interviewing� speed interviews could include a circuit of as many as 14 mini interviews of 15 minutes apiece in a row.

�A typical speed interview meeting could include up to 10-15 jobseekers, each of who moves along to a new interviewer at the ring of a bell. Entry-level candidates will often find themselves in this type of interview.� This is assembly line HR, a typical American product. You could call it workplace musical chairs.

�However much of a joke you find these things when you are reading about them, they are dead serious when you are applying for a job,� says Mumbai-based HR consultant D. Singh. �It�s more about finding out how you react in an unfamiliar situation.� Still puzzled? Welcome to the fishbowl.

ODDBALL QUESTIONS

What you might be asked at your next interview

� If you could be any character in fiction, whom would you select?

� If Hollywood made a movie about your life, who would you like to see playing the lead role?

� If someone wrote a biography about you, what do you think the title should be?

� If you could compare yourself to any animal, which would it be and why?

� If you were a salad, what dressing would you be?

(Source: On the job: Prepare for the new, bizarre trend in interviews, by Anita Bruzzese)