During phone interviews we provide the applicants with more information on the position, identify their motivations, assess their communication and interpersonal skills, check language proficiency and ask them about their expectations. Based on the phone interview, we decide wether a personal meeting should be arranged with the applicants.
At the personal interview we apply different methods to discover the professional experience and personal characteristics of a candidate. The combination of various methods provides us with a complex picture of the candidate and with this knowledge, we can find the applicant most suitable for the job, the client request, we can require written and oral references and always verify the authetnicity of the information.
Professional interviews are typically conduced in the case of positions in which the knowledge and the professional experience acquired by the candidate in the given field are the primary aspects and the focus is on the knowledge immediately accessible.
In the case of situation interviews we analyse the problem solving tasks or conflicts typical of the given job. By using this method we can not only measure the skills of the candidates but also gain a lot of extra information about a candidate's personality.
Competence-based interview technique
The competence- based interview technique is a method we recently introduced which significantly increases the efficiacy of selection. The competencies essential for the given position are defined in a group so that we can select the applicant who, on the basis of the objectives and the characteristics of the job, most closely fits the job profile. The definitions and levels of the competence are accurately recorded in order to avoid differences of interpretation. The most promising applicants are selected on the basis of the priority competencies. All of this is presented to our clients on standard, brief, one-page evaluation sheets. This way the future employer can assess to what extent individual candidates satisfy the key competencies on the basis of transparent, easy to understand reports and can also determine the performance that individual applicants would achieve in the given position relative to each other.
Structural interviews of this kind can also be applied with good results in the selection of customer service and administrative employees as in these cases a few of our consultants seek employees for the same job. In addition to the questions addressed to the applicants, candidates are also interviewed on the basis of the competencies defined by the client. The main point in this case is to make the candidate responses comparable and to cover the selection criteria.
Tests
In rare cases, if needed by the client, we also confirm a selction decision by test results.
The majority of psychometric tests do not necessarily aim for drawing up a complete picture but for identifying dimensions of the personality that are important for the given job. Of course, tests aimed at a comprehensive assessment may also be performed along the rationale that we cannot get an overall picture of a person by studying specific personality traits separately; these need to be analyzed as a whole.