Saturday, April 26, 2014
These Interview Fake-Outs Reveal What Your Employer Really Wants To Know
⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community: There are few professional rituals as steadfast as the job interview. But there is one way in which interviews are changing: They're accounting for personality. These characteristics are called soft skills, or emotional intelligence. Assessing soft skills is about determining if a candidate is someone the employer actually wants to have around five days a week, says Daniel Flamberg, managing director of tech-centric ad agency Publicis Kaplan Thaler.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
I truely believe that the interpersonal skill of people working together is significantly more important than almost every other skill someone might need to perform a job. I'm not saying they don't need to know what they're doing (of course, they do), but I've seen people who were brilliant get fired for pissing off the wrong people, and I've seen less knowledgeable people do the same job better just because people like them better. Although that does seem a bit unfair, if the ultimate goal is to achieve maximum productivity by combining social and physical skill, it can be much more advantageous to have a nice person rather than a genius.
I really like the question about how you operate for optimum productivity and optimum happiness- I feel like it says a lot about the person based on their answer, and it's not something that has an easy "correct" answer to cheat your way out of the question with. Personally I hate the "think fast" questions- I think they're silly and mostly just make the interviewer feel superior because they make the interviewee uncomfortable. I'm not sure how I feel about written interviews- it seems a bit too much like applying to college, and I know that no one's college application truly communicates who they are as a person. I feel like face-to-face interviews are much better to get to know someone, especially when interpersonal skills are such a high priority.
I definitely agree with this article that the modern job market is really looking for people with the strong interpersonal and soft skills. I think that skills specific to a job can be taught, but the soft skills are the things that take years of practice to really develop to a polished level. I think this is one reason why a high intensity theatre education is so applicable to so many jobs. In the context of our work we literally hit every soft skill that employers are looking for, everything from working well under pressure and a tight schedule, to teamwork and leadership, to giving a good presentation.
I really liked this article because it covered very specific examples of questions that are meant to get a more interpersonal response. I had to take a class on emotional intelligence for an internship once and the teacher was really adamant about the fact that technical skills in a certain field were no longer enough to secure a job. Employer are now so much more interested in how well you will be able to fit into and thrive their company culture. It is definitely something to start preparing for.
This article for some reason reminded me alot of the interviews we had for CMU. How the questions often had nothing to do with theatre. I think this program as well as other intensive theatre programs teach us soft skills more than we realize. Every soft skill listed here i know we touch on in one way or another. This also reminds me of an article written a while ago about this program and how we don't offer technical class. We don't teach someone how to use this specific board we teach the broad strokes so that they can keep relevant and be a leader in the field. I think these soft skills really help with achieving that goal.
I definitely like reading all these articles on interviews and how to do them. This is definitely a theme I have noticed in the recent articles and this one put a name to it all. When I think about how I would interview, I would definitely want to show how I am passionate about something, but I always feel awkward about how to bring it up. I guess I need to practice interviews and work with career services on that part.
Post a Comment