13 How do you conduct an Interview?

I just came from interviewing applicants for a project I’m supposed to be handling. I‘m not sure if I did it right.

I’m interviewing people for a customer service job basically assessing their skills in speaking a second-language fluently enough to get the message across. Even though English is integrated at school at a very early age and floods our media from TV shows to movies, music and even literature, it is still a second-language… not everyone speaks it well.

So, my primary task in that interview is to get them talking so I could determine how well they can express themselves without need of scripts or canned responses. And I do this talking about anything and everything under the sun. I talked to one applicant about how The Art of War is his favorite book and an anecdote from a friend who insists the book taught him how to court girls. I talked to another one about Detective Conan and theories on why he never grows up. I talked to a young, fresh-out-of-school kid about our Game of Thrones theories. I talked to a 40-year old grandma about how she cannot say she hasn’t achieved anything yet if her grand kid turned out as awesome as she was telling me. And then I realized in the midst of all these conversations, I was supposed to be conducting an interview — you know, a formal process determining their fate in having employment for the foreseeable future. I don’t think I was doing it right.

Each encounter turned out to a candid conversation on random topics that the applicant and I was totally invested in. But was it the correct way to do this? (This really is a question, if you’re an HR practitioner can you give feedback?)

At the end of the day, I can really just select a few. They are no longer random names on a page though. There are faces, smiles, stories, lives attached to all the application sheets littering my desk. Thankfully, HR makes the final decision. I hope I see them all again someday though.

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