Introduction
The process of recruitment has now become one of the most demanding in terms of management for a number of reasons. The most important one, however, is related to the competitiveness rate in the market, making it complicated to attract the best employee to the enterprise. Hence, despite all the existing employment patterns, there is no magical formula available to make the company stand out to a maximum extent. For this reason, throughout the current employment life cycle, it is of crucial importance to pay decent attention to the aspects of the employees’ application (Baur et al., 2014). In order to achieve the desired results, one is to build a perfect interview structure that would attract the employees, along with making them understand the values and expectations of a company.
Types of questions
During the application process, it is important to prepare the blueprint of the most relevant questions in terms of the organizational culture and the peculiarities of the position. According to the vast majority of researchers, the following questions could be divided into three categories of skill-based, behavioral, and situational (Arthur, 2012). However, some scholars dwell upon these aspects more precisely and focus on the categories within these types, e.g., past behavioral questions (Hartwell et al., 2019). In its turn, each of the question type is specifically aimed at collecting an overall employee image in the context of the company’s culture. In the case of CapraTek, the enterprise’s history requires a great deal of the workers’ dedication in order to maintain its positive image both in the staff and in the market.
In order to conduct a successful interview that allows an employer to create the right impression of a candidate, it is important to pay enough attention to evaluate the employee’s motivation behind the application. For this purpose, one of the first questions asked should concern the candidate’s background knowledge of the enterprise. Once a potential employee is capable of explicitly discuss the major values and services CapraTek obtains, it becomes clear that he/she is interested in professional growth in the exact environment. Furthermore, however important job competence is for a sales representative, it is one’s attitude to the working environment that matters.
Another quite important part of a structured interview should be dedicated to the examination of one’s competency in the field. CapraTek, as an enterprise, has become a company with a history of successful acquisitions and steadily marked growth patterns. Thus, people who are to get involved in the working process should be well-aware of the detailed job description for a position applied, considering the fact that they are present in the initial job proposal. Once the potential employee is aware of a regional sales representative’s major responsibilities, it is important to learn about his/her previous experience in the field. In the case there is no specific competence in terms of the position discussed, a manager should pay close attention to the ways candidates could possibly link the job description to other experiences in life, demonstrating problem-solving skills.
When dealing with choosing the best candidate for a regional sales representative position, it would be a significant benefit for the employee to perform excellent critical thinking skills both during the negotiations and in the communication with staff. In order to identify one’s ability to apply an analytical approach, a manager should ask a question that includes analysis of the issue from different perspectives. Hence, in this case, the most appropriate question scenario is to ask a candidate to ponder opposite aspects of the same notion, as in the question of identification beneficial and negative qualities for the current position. Moreover, it could also give candidates the chance to reflect upon their own place in this paradigm.
One of the most important aspects to consider when dealing with interview questionnaire creation is its universality in terms of the answers comparison. Hence, the questions asked should be appropriate for each candidate, also creating the right impression for the position. For a company with clear values and vision like CapraTek, it is important for the employees to share this passion in terms of major goals and ambitions. Thus, asking the candidate about the favorite part in the regional sales sphere will help the manager decide whether the potential employee’s perception of the job correlates with what the company expects from the unit.
Besides the classically structured interview scenario, it is of crucial importance to make the candidate feel comfortable during the conversation. To achieve this, a manager should appeal to one’s emotions, letting a person share some personal concerns and experiences related to the position. Such a semi-structured model is built on the principles of a full-scale discussion instead of conventional models of questions and answers interview patterns. Once a candidate had a chance to share some emotional aspects of his/her working experience, the HR manager will also be capable of creating a person’s psychological portrait in the context of the company’s environment.
Problem-solving skills are one of the central discussion subjects during the interview, as some basic aspects of the job knowledge could be easily taught on condition that an employee is solution-oriented. In order to make a candidate feel comfortable when talking about challenges, it is important to make this question feel like a friendly dialogue rather than an interview. To achieve this, a manager should actively respond to the information using imitation techniques and mirroring the candidate’s words and gestures. When the discussion comes to a logical end, it would be beneficial to reflect the aforementioned information instead of rushing into further interview stages.
However, when it comes to an open discussion, it is of crucial significance to combine these semi-structured questions with the ones explicitly related to the position. Otherwise, a candidate might feel uncomfortable when too much attention is drawn to his/her emotional experiences. Hence, a few questions on reflecting the psychological perspective of job perception will be enough to realize the employee’s motivation and willingness to become a part of the CapraTek team. The closing question might concern the history behind the candidate’s decision to work in the sales department.
In order to build a successful team in the workplace, HR managers are to define the patterns of communication within the unit staff. Hence, it is important to evaluate one’s ability to control behavior and cope with stress in the workplace in order not to disrupt the atmosphere in the workplace. While listening to one’s experiences of dealing with a stressful situation, a manager has an excellent opportunity to examine how a candidate is responding to this kind of behavioral questions that frequently make people uncomfortable. The follow-up question should concern communication with supervisors in this kind of situation to make sure that the employee is aware of the opportunity to get professional help.
CapraTek is a company trained to handle a variety of challenges due to the scopes of workload and overall enterprise’s reputation in the market. For this reason, people who are willing to become a part of this mechanism are to be ready for a variety of challenges in the workplace. Hence, it is important to define the ways in which a candidate acts when urged to work under pressure. In cases when a person is emotionally unstable, he/she is at risk of struggling with constant mental breakdowns, whereas team leaders are to deal with productivity decrease and crises in the workplace, as psychological issues are frequently contagious in a team.
Final, nevertheless, an important part of the interview process deals with situation-based questions where the candidate is to find a solution to a common issue taking place at the position of a regional sales representative. In such a way, the HR manager will have a chance to examine how a potential employee would react to the common challenges. Even when the answers are not exhaustive enough for a problem solution, it is important to see the direction in which one thinks in a hypothetical scenario.
The situational interview questions are ideally related to both aspects of working experience and communication in the workplace, as these are the pillars of a successful enterprise. Hence, while the candidates have a chance to develop their critical thinking skills, the HR manager is capable of estimating a brief evaluation of the interview process and compare the answers of all the candidates. Taking everything into consideration, it might be concluded that the process of question selection for an interview is crucial in terms of finding a perfect candidate for a position. Moreover, the successfully chosen questions put a company at an advantage of recruiting the best employees in the HR market.
References
Arthur, D. (2012). Recruiting, interviewing, selecting, and orienting new employees (5th ed.). AMACOM.
Baur, J. E., Buckley, M. R., Bagdasarov, Z., & Dharmasiri, A. S. (2014). A historical approach to realistic job previews: an exploration into their origins, evolution, and recommendations for the future. Journal of Management History, 20(2), 200-223.
Fjell, S. (2017). The 7 stages of the employee lifecycle and why they matter. Web.
Hartwell, C. J., Johnson, C. D., & Posthuma, R. A. (2019). Are we asking the right questions? Predictive validity comparison of four structured interview question types. Journal of Business Research, 100, 122-129.