AKRI has a strong interest in interviewing for a number of reasons, many of which will be common to other organisations. These reasons include recruitment, staff development, customer satisfaction etc. In addition and in common with many knowledge based industries we also have a need to interview in order to capture knowledge and to identify and translate knowledge. This sort of interviewing has a different emphasis than that required for recruitment etc but nevertheless has the same general objective. Furthermore, AKRI has a central role for interviewing as part of its Knowledge Structure Mapping (KSM) methodology and in the pursuit of this work has carried out a great deal of interviews in recent years. The requirements of interviews for KSM are even more rigorous than those needed for knowledge capture but they are more focused and therefore less varied.
AKRI is involved in the dissemination of the KSM methodology to other practitioners. One of the key elements in the methodology is the interviewing component. If this is not done correctly then the resulting Knowledge Structure Map may have little meaning. During the course of dissemination work it has become clear that good interviewing is more difficult and less widely practiced than was realised. Even experienced interviewers often adopt a self centred rather than an information centred approach and a few even fail to understand the whole point of an interview whilst still carrying out a procedure that utilises the resources that a good interview would utilise. It is the need to identify ways of improving interviewing techniques whilst not attempting to smother individual style and individual strengths that is the driving force for this work.
What sort of things can be done to improve the general standard of interviewing? Many areas of advice and support for interviews concentrate on greatest business need, that of recruitment, and focus on what questions to ask and how to score the answers given. More of this type of training (if training is the correct word) is said to be a way to improving interviewing. Yet this would only work for recruitment interviews because the questions are focused on recruitment. I would argue that interviews of different types have a common core and the training mentioned above to improve recruitment interviews would do little to address or even explain the common core.
So maybe this is the first thing that could be done to improve interviewing, that is to explain to would be interviewers, what the point of interviewing is and what is the underlying theme for all interviews.
I have been part of interviews where many of the questions before and after a candidate interview concern how the interviewer performed, did they come across well, did they ask the right questions, did each interviewer cover their assigned bit of the interview properly. Sometimes such discussion has been greater than that about the candidate.
So maybe interviewers need to understand that the focus of interviews is the discovery of information and their performance is not being tested and the candidate’s performance is relevant in so much the information may be about the candidate, at least in the recruitment case it is.
I have been involved in interviews where interviewees genuinely fail to appreciate the importance of their knowledge and sometimes fail to recall highly relevant parts of it. Sometimes interviewees really don’t know where to start talking and how to make progress.
Maybe then, the interviewer should understand that their role is one of helping, supporting and advising the interviewee in ways of getting at the information required. Certainly the interviewer is responsible for creating and maintaining an environment in which the information sought is more likely to emerge.
So there are ways that interviewing can be improved. These improvements would aim at the core function of an interview rather than at specific instances or cases. This is not to deny that it is not valid to provide direct support to enable occasional interviewers to perform more effectively by giving specific targeted advice. This work however is aimed at improving the core features of interviewing, leaving each specific interview case to the educated interviewer who can then adapt their core interviewing knowledge to suite their own style and to satisfy the needs of each case.
The intention of this work is to provide core knowledge that will enable people to interview more effectively. For that they need to understand the key components of an interview and have a clear understanding of the objectives. It is most important that an interviewer also understands that it is not he or she that is the focus or even the most important feature of an interview. The important thing is to satisfy the objectives of an interview and deliver the information being sought as completely and accurately as possible.
This work will have a descriptive rather than a prescriptive theme. That is, it is not the aim of this study to provide instructions for interviewers. It is the aim of this study to highlight the knowledge area of interviewing and help people to understand and acquire the key elements of knowledge that will enable them to be more effective interviewers. Before looking more closely at the knowledge area of interviewing it will be useful to make sure that the interview itself is clarified and consider more carefully the roles that people have in interviews.