5.12 Interview Types

1. Traditional interview.: This type of interview normally takes place in the office. It consists of the interviewer and the candidate, and a series of questions are asked and answered.
2. Telephone/video interview: A telephone interview is a relatively quick and inexpensive prescreening to narrow the list of people before a traditional interview. It can be used to determine salary requirements or other data that might automatically rule out giving someone a traditional interview. It is an opportunity for candidates to disqualify themselves from the selection process. For example, if you receive two hundred resumes and narrow these down to twenty-five, it is still unrealistic to interview twenty-five people in person. At this point, you may decide to conduct phone interviews of those twenty-five candidates, which could narrow the in-person interviews to a more manageable ten or so people.
3. Panel interview: A panel interview occurs when several people are interviewing one candidate at the same time. While this type of interview can be nerve racking for the candidate, it can also be a more effective use of time. Consider some companies who require three to four people to interview candidates for a job. It would be unrealistic to ask the candidate to come in for three or four interviews, so it makes sense for them to be interviewed by everyone at once.
4. Group interview: In a group interview, two or more candidates interview at the same time. This type of interview can be an excellent source of information if you need to know how they may relate to other people in their job. This method can be useful if you expect to hire more than one candidate of the group and want to observe ‘team’ dynamics – or who might best work well together.
5. Company tour/meal or cocktail interviews: Many organizations offer to take the candidate to lunch or dinner for the interview. Others may offer a tour of the workplace. This can allow for a more casual meeting where, as the interviewer, you might be able to gather more information about the person, such as their manners, social skills, and treatment of waitstaff. This type of interview is common in certain domains (e.g. finance, accounting, client relations). While this interview may resemble an unstructured interview, organizations do try to structure them as much as possible with detailed assessment sheets to be completed after the event.

Most organizations include multiple interviews in their selection process. These processes may include one or more of the above types of interviews. For example, they may conduct preliminary phone interviews, then do a meal interview, and follow up with a traditional interview, depending on the type of job.

“Interviewing” from Human Resources Management – 2nd Ontario Edition by Elizabeth Cameron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.