Interviewing

In most cases, applying for a position as a teacher or school leader will involve one or more interviews, and this can be something of a minefield. While other fields also use interviews in their selection processes, three things in particular stand out in education, and in my experience both direct and vicarious, things do not turn out well when a focus is not placed on all three.

Few if any interviewers in an educational or school context have been trained in interviewing. I remember participating in two school director meetings, one a regional group of perhaps 25 and the other an accreditation training of 50+. In both, I was the only one who had done any interview training and that was only because I had a part-time stint in executive search while at college.

Few if any of these interviewers have a written policy or interviewing "how to" / pro formas to follow. At the regional meeting, only those of us who had attended a training in unlawful hiring had developed a policy and that was largely a a reaction to the legal advice we received. At the accreditation meeting, again it was only me.

I have been interviewed where the interviewer apologised for being unprepared because she had only found about and been asked about three minutes prior to conduct the interview. In another, the interviewer was a specialist in another subject area and had not studied in mine since she was in high school herself. And in another interview for a director's position, the HR person told me she could not conduct the interview because her role was to receive applications, check resumes, collect and verify references etc.

When I have constructed panels (see below), I have been told by Deputy Principals or Heads of Department every single time that while s/he had conducted hiring interviews previously, this was the first time s/he had been given a written policy and "how to" pro forma. Teachers I asked to join a panel told me repeatedly of feeling in previous experiences that they had been interviewed by people who were winging it and who lacked any strategy or goal.

So what do I propose?

Firstly, no candidate should be called to interview who is not capable of doing the job. Before begnning, you need (a) a position profile (b) a person profile and, most importantly, (c) screening to select candidates who meet both (a) and (b).

The interview should be used to find a candidate who will :

• fit with the school's Mission and its strategic plan
• complement existing faculty and/or fill existing holes in program or faculty knowledge and /or competencies
• fit into the existing team.

An interview panel

To achieve this, I construct a panel of the Director, the division head (Elementary, Middle, High) and if appropriate, the Head of Department and then two or three teachers of the same grade level or subject area with whom the appointee wiill be working. The panel interviews candidates individually and not as a group, so each interviewee then has about five interviews, each about 20 minutes with a different person who is looking for different things.

I firmly believe that group interviews are inherently flawed. A candidate can more easily put on a show or false front, or play to the group, while individual interviewers have less time and thus fewer questions, s/he cannot explore something important to his/her area or level or team. I remember one instance where a candidate admitted in an interview that he loses his temper and hits his own children which I am convinced would not have been discovered in a group interview with less time needed to maintain an act. I remember another occasion where a candidate who had said that he would be delighted to run a science club shared with a potential teaching team-member he had said this to get the job and had no interest in running a club or in doing it well.

Roles

Secondly, panel members should know what can and cannot be asked, and should follow a common policy on how interviews are run, openings and closings, question types, active listening, note-taking, confidentiality and so on. Each panel member should have a role and an area of focus, for example the Director zooms in on Mission and Vision, a Head of Area mighr look at subject knowledge and a teacher at handling interruptions or favorite football teams.

Questions

Thirdly and most importantly, each interview panel member must have a written set of questions so that opening questions are uniform and consistent; follow up questions will of course vary. This leads to greater objectivity, thus legality, and a greater chance of meeting position and person profiles. Having individual written questionnaires also means that the process can be crafted, repetition avoided, necessary areas included and so on.

Training

This of course requires training, polices and procedures and shared understandings and offers the school a great opportunity for professional development and vision and team-building. Teachers feel valued to have been included and to have had their opinions heard. Every one of my interview panel members told me s/he enoyed it and wanted to be part of the next process. They have been more welcoming and supportive to new colleagues than in schools where I worked which followed a different approach.

And so

The main point is that the function of the interview is not to find out whether the candidate can do the job; the screening process does this. The interview's purpose is to uncover what kind of person s/he is and whether s/he would be a good fit which is why you see questions like these. The reason for these questions, and the famous Oxbridge interviews, is not to find out what the candidate says but how s/he answers the question and what that says about him/her.

Things such as the Vahey incident are not only the result of poor leadership and supervision, but also of poor recruitment. Interviewing is too often desultory at best, and yet it really is the most important element in the selection process.

**Please leave your comments and questions below.**