Interview Process: Reverse the tables.

Here is the purpose of this blog - Design an interview process, the outcome of which is agreeable to both the parties - the interviewer and the interviewee. Many a times, the very process is agreeable only to only one party - the interviewer. Also the process incites the sadistic tendencies of one party and nervousness on the others. The potential loss is for the company and only company. The interviewer does not loose anything as he is not the stakeholder of the company and interviewee, under reasonable assumptions, will find another job anyways.

So the bottom-line is to find a process which is gainful to the companies. I guess, I wanted to read this blog to every HR (typically software firms) and get their critical comments.

Lets analyze the normal process first and the fallacies associated with it and then try to find out the solution around each fallacy. I am not sure of the other industry but I am aware of the process in the Software firms.

NORMAL INTERVIEW PROCESS: An interviewee resume is short listed by anyone from HR to the manager of any division. He is then screened over the telephone just to make sure that 'wasting time' on this candidate is worth enough or not. After that we have the face to face interview. This can be one to one or many to one relationship. In a well planned environment, the interviewee might have series of rounds with increasing toughness after each round. This gives him the feeling of the reducing 'inches' to the 'final goal'. However, the problem arises when the sadistic tendency of the interviewer comes into picture. This is not abnormal and anyone who had given multiple interviews or even heard interview stories will readily acknowledge it. For example asking questions which were tangent to the nature of the job or asking the questions which have no relevance at all with anything in the name of checking the ‘lateral thinking’ ability. This puts of the good candidates. Outside the interview room each candidate claims the irrelevancy of each question and asking what is nowhere related to normal programming practice.

SUGGESTION: My only take is that interviewer should be more qualified than the interviewee and particularly in the topics he is taking the interview. The interviewee should not feel that the interviewer had asked tangential questions just to harass him or anything of that sort. Now how do we decide that is it the sadistic tendency of the interviewer or the false claims of the interviewee? The answer lies in the ‘reverse the table’ approach. After the interview is over from one end and interviewer dismiss the candidate, we should reverse the table and swap the roles. Now interviewee becomes the interviewer and vice versa. This will give the chance of the interviewer to show him that he is indeed qualified more than the interviewee – if he is able to answer satisfactorily to the interviewee. This can be judged by any third party of the company itself. Quite often, few people are famous to have the sadistic tendency within the company but then HR asks them to ‘help’ in the interview process. So in the ‘reverse table’ scenario the onus lies on the interviewer to show that he is better qualified than the interviewee in the topics in which he had rejected him.

Can you envision such a process?? What do you say about such a process???