Types of Job Interviews (Tips For Acing Them)
Behavioral Interviews
Behavioral interviewing focuses on a candidate’s past experiences by asking candidates to provide specific examples of how they have demonstrated certain behaviors, knowledge, skills and abilities.
Case Interviews
A case interview is a job interview in which the applicant is presented with a challenging business scenario that he/she must investigate and propose a solution to. Case interviews are designed to test the candidate’s analytical skills and “soft” skills within a realistic business context. The case is often a business situation or a business case that the interviewer has worked on in real life.
Case interviews are mostly used in hiring for management consulting jobs. Consulting firms use case interviews to evaluate candidate’s analytical ability and problem-solving skills; they are looking not for a “correct” answer but for an understanding of how the applicant thinks and how the applicant approaches problems.
Competency-Based Interviews
use questions which aim to find out how you have used specific skills in your previous experience and how you approach problems, tasks and challenges. Also called behavioural or situational questions, they are often used in first interviews.
Exit Interviews
An exit interview is a conversation that happens between a company and an employee who has decided to leave the business. It’s helpful to imagine them as the opposite of a job interview – instead of asking why they want to join your company, you’re asking them why they’ve decided to leave. The objective is to better understand why that employee has decided to resign, in the hope that the company can improve how it works and prevent other employees from following suit.
Final Interviews
A final interview is one of your last chances to make a positive impression with a high-level employee, and excellent responses to their questions could increase your chances of receiving a job offer. Preparing for a final interview includes developing effective answers that could impress the hiring manager.
During the final interview, you will probably meet a member or members of senior management, such as the CEO in smaller companies or the HR manager. It is important to build a rapport with them during the interview to show you are a good fit for the company. Remember, getting the job will not only be based on your skills and experience but also on your ability to develop long-term professional relationships.
In your previous interviews, you probably answered questions related to your skills and qualifications, meaning you probably won’t reencounter them in your final interview. During this interview, the HR manager or CEO may want to gauge whether you will fit in with the company’s culture and have the proper emotional intelligence for the role. For this reason, you can expect behavioral questions during the final interview.
Group Interviews
There are two types of group interviews–group and panel. A group interview consists of a single interviewer interviewing multiple candidates at the same time. Group interviews are most common in industries like food service, hospitality and retail.
Panel interviews, on the other hand, consists of a panel of multiple members of a hiring team interviewing a single job candidate. The interview group usually includes the hiring managers, relevant team members, and an HR representative.
Informal Interviews
an interview that takes place in a casual setting, such as over coffee or lunch. Although an informal interview is not structured like a traditional, and more formal, job interview, the interviewer’s aim is the same, to assess whether the candidate would fit in the organization.
Informational Interviews
an informal conversation you can have with someone working in an area of interest to you. It is an effective research tool and is best done after preliminary online research. It is not a job interview, and the objective is not to find job openings.
Mock Interviews
A typical mock interview is a practice job interview held with a professional career counselor. A mock interview helps you learn how to answer difficult questions, develop interview strategies, improve your communication skills, and reduce your stress before an actual job interview.
Off-Site Interviews
Whether the opening is confidential in nature or an offsite meeting is simply more convenient for the interviewer, meeting at a coffee shop, hotel or restaurant isn’t unusual. When you get this type of interview request, your mind immediately goes into overdrive.
On-the-Spot Interview
Sometimes you’ll be expected to do an on-the-spot interview. For example, you may turn in your application and be asked to do an interview right away. Or when an organization (typically retail or hospitality) announces they will be holding open interviews on a specific date. In situations like these, hiring personnel use on-the-spot interviews to screen applicants and immediately decide who should and should not be included in the next step of the recruiting process.
Panel Job Interviews
A panel interview is a job interview in which an applicant answers questions from a group of people who then make the hiring decision. Hiring managers use panel interviews to gain perspective from other people in the organization and occasionally those outside the organization.
Panel Interviews reduce the risk of making a bad hire. The panel’s goal is to make the best hiring decision possible given the information available about the position and the finalists.
Since each panel member brings a different set of experiences, thoughts, beliefs, and biases to the interview process, the members’ strengths tend to compensate for each others’ weaknesses. In the most effective panels, members work well with one another while being unafraid to respectfully challenge each other’s judgments and assertions about the potential hire.
Phone Interviews
Employers use telephone interviews as a way of identifying and recruiting candidates for employment. Phone interviews are often used to screen candidates to narrow the pool of applicants who will be invited for in person interviews. A phone call is a relatively quick, low-effort way to determine whether a candidate is suitable.
They are also used to minimize the expense involved in interviewing out-of-town candidates. For remote positions, a phone interview may be the only option.
Restaurant Interviews
One of the reasons employers take job candidates out to lunch or dinner is to evaluate their social skills and to see if they can handle themselves gracefully under pressure. Remember you’re still being observed when you participate in a job interview at a restaurant so use your best table manners, choose foods that aren’t too messy. Also, take a look at what to wear when interviewing over a meal.
Second Interviews
The second interview might be a the chance for the interviewer or interviewers to delve a bit deeper into your experience and how you might fit in the business. There may be some unanswered questions which the interviewer would like to explore further or they may have some queries about the way you answered a question. In a second interview, you should expect a more in-depth discussion about how you will operate in the role. By this point, you will have already had an introduction with the employer during an application, phone screen or first interview.
Structured Interviews
A structured interview is a data collection method that relies on asking questions in a set order to collect data on a topic. It is one of four types of interviews. In research, structured interviews are often quantitative in nature. There are many ways in which you can conduct structured interviews. For example, you can conduct them over the phone, face-to-face, over the Internet, using computer programs, such as Skype, or using videophone. Structured interview questions can be open-ended or closed-ended.
Semi-Structured Interview
A job interview in which the interviewer does not strictly follow a list of questions. Instead, the interviewer will ask open-ended questions, allowing for a conversation rather than a straightforward question and answer format.
Unstructured Job Interviews
An unstructured interview is a job interview in which questions may be changed based on the interviewee’s responses. While the interviewer may have a few set questions prepared in advance, the direction of the interview is rather casual, and questions flow based on the direction of the conversation. Unstructured interviews are often seen as less intimidating than formal interviews.
Video Interviews
A video interview is a job interview that takes place remotely and uses video technology as the communication medium.
Video interviews are an increasingly popular tool in talent acquisition because of their ability to save the time and money involved in traditional, in-person interviews; remove geographic constraints; automate candidate screening; and improve the quality of data in the recruitment management system.
They are used at many stages of the hiring process. For example, in the early stages, the hiring manager might pose a set of questions and ask job seekers to record their responses in a video. This enables the employer to screen candidates quickly and select which ones will proceed to the next stage.
Tips for Acing an Interview
Regardless of the type of interview you’re participating in (and you won’t always know what to expect until the interview starts), it’s important to take the time to prepare and to practice answering the interview questions employers typically ask.
