Why job interviews should be scrapped off
Ureport
By
By Moses Omusolo
| May 28, 2015
This is my radical polemic against the conventional interview as a yardstick for gauging a job-seeker’s suitability for formal employment.
The job interview, you and I know, has been strictly irrelevant since the beginning of formal employment, and will be so till the end of the same.
Prove me right or wrong.
At the end of this, I will have successfully proved the contention that job interviews are also among the key factors contributing to mass youth unemployment.
I personally wouldn’t wish anyone to interview me for any job because;
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First, the interview (job) is essentially designed to exclude rather than include (in the sense of accepting the interviewee to join the organization). In fact any job interview done in this world is primarily designed to fail the candidate rather than to ‘pass’ them.
Hence the formal employment interview is a hindrance rather than a stepping-stone to employment.
The job interview is a flawed mechanism because it defies the very logic it purports to support; that it is a reliable means to the employment of a candidate. It is a sure means to unemployment; ‘formal unemployment’.
Why, if, in your job interview, you are more excited to dismiss me (rather quick) more than you intend to accept me—especially if you employ tricky and irrelevant questions (to say the least), what is the point of the process?
Next, the job interviewer tends to ask questions that have nothing to do with the job I am applying and may never be called upon to do.
Meaning that most of these questions, if not all, are usually irrelevant.
But then the interviewer wants me to answer most of these questions in the most correctly way, before they can consider me for hiring.
The absurdity of all these is that I am expected to ace a very irrelevant ‘exam’ that is the interview, in order to get a relevant job. Yet a job is not an exam.
In connection to that, a job interview is essentially (for all intents and purposes) an ‘exam'; a job (work), on the other hand, is (for all intents and purposes) just a job, nothing more or less. Hence the questions: an exam for a job? Is an exam the same as the job? How about a ‘job test’ for a job? Hence I am against the conventional job interview, for all it is worth.
The best way to interview for a job is to ask the prospective employee just one key question: Can you do the job? If yes, the job is given as a test. If excellently done the candidate is employed.
Otherwise, I don’t need to be examined for ‘paper intelligence’ but rather practical intelligence.
Lastly, I will proceed to challenge the underlying assumptions of the conventional job interview. One of them is that it is the best way of ‘knowing’ whether one is suited for a particular position. The truth is that it isn’t.
An interview, as we saw before, is an exam set by people who have particular questions for particular answers, which in most cases are very much unrelated to the job.
Which if the interviewer is not keen, cannot know me well on the first day.
Furthermore, the interview is set by people who have certain biases and prejudices they would like to confirm. If they fail to ‘see’ the biases, they won’t hire the person.
All in all, the conventional interview is not only a bad-faith (*mauvaise foi*) system, but also a bad one—in method.
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