Over-preparation certainly can spoil an interview by destroying the element of spontaneity that will make it an enjoyable and stimulating experience for both participants. Interviewing at its best is a creative process that leaves inter viewer and interviewee changed, if only in the slightest way and preferably for the better. Interviewers, however, who are so well prepared that nothing is left to chance, find it difficult to be spontaneous and therefore they are not always able to respond creatively to the interviewee.
Good interviewing is also communication or else it is nothing, and this is not always possible if the interviewer is worrying whether or not the interview is going according to plan.
There are two extremes of interviewing. At the one extreme you have an interview that is left entirely to chance, in which neither the subject matter nor the questions have been prepared in advance. The interviewer asks questions which come to mind or which the interviewee's answers have suggested, and that way interviewer and interviewee wander together from topic to topic in the hope that eventually something useful will emerge.
Psychotherapeutic interviewing is of this order. The therapist may either start with a question or leave it to the client to suggest a subject, and the 'interview' proceeds from there. However, as this is all done in the client's time and at his or her expense, it does not matter how much ground is covered, whereas most managers have to justify the time they spend in interviewing to prove that they are earning their salaries.
At the other extreme of interviewing is the highly structured interview in which questions are predetermined and answers are limited, so that neither party has much choice in what they say. In some market research interviews of this kind, the questions are written in such a way that the interviewer is required to emphasize certain words so that whoever is con ducting the interview will always ask the question in precisely the same way. The interviewee's replies are also limited to 'Yes', or 'No', or variations on 'A lot', 'A little', 'Not at all'.
In recent years some organizations have taken to using structured recruitment interviews as a preliminary 'weeding-out' of candidates because they claim that it speeds up the selection process. This may or may not be true, but I suspect that the real reason is that the organizations cannot depend on the skills of their interviewers, and this is borne out by the fact that the inter views are programmed into computers, so that the candidate does not even have to talk to another human being.
Not that computer-programmed interviews are intrinsically wrong. Recently I sat with a computer for half an hour working through a medical questionnaire and in that time it learnt more about me, my habits - good and bad - and my health than most doctors (some of whom are truly awful interviewers) could in hours.
The five steps to good preparation are:
- Defining the purpose
- Researching the subject
- Organizing the venue
- Working out an interview plan
- Preparing the questions
Interviews, therefore, should not be open-ended. On the other hand it is not always appropriate to stick rigidly to a time limit. It is essential that managers are accessible to the people who work for them. By being too mean with your interview time, you are giving your people the impression that you do not consider them important.
It is not possible to state categorically how long any particular type of interview should last. The length is determined by the purpose. Recruitment interviews seem to depend on the seniority of the recruit - the higher the level, the longer the interview. An American survey established that interviewers spend four times longer interviewing senior management than unskilled workers - no more than fifteen minutes for the latter, one hour for the former. I have been dismissed from a recruitment interview in ten minutes flat. I don't think they could have found out much about me in that time, but it was enough to tell them (apparently) that I was not suited to the job.
Counseling interviews may take the longest - usually up to an hour - because it is important that the interviewer does not rush the interviewee when talking about intimate subjects. In general, few interviews of any kind need last longer than ninety minutes. After that, both participants are going to be past caring and certainly not alert enough any longer to concentrate fully on the subject. If the interview is not concluded within that time, it may be better to continue it on another day. Getting the timing right means getting the pacing right, too.
Planned interviews are well paced. They have a strong sense of forward movement, of both participants working towards a mutually desired goal. Unplanned interviews, however, tend to meander. Interviewers spend too much time getting the interview started, then, realizing that the time is passing, Skip important subjects in their rush to finish it. A colleague told me of a job interview she attended which ended abruptly when, in answer to his irrelevant and discriminatory question, she told the interviewer that she had three children. He assumed wrongly and unfairly that this meant that she would not devote all her energies to her job. In fact, they were all living on their own, but in his eagerness to conclude the interview, he forgot to ask her their ages.
With proper planning you will also know how much time you have for each stage of the interview, from the warming-up to the termination. You will be able to cope with interviewees who are slow to reply by gently urging them along without confusing or upsetting them; and you will avoid the embarrassment of stopping half-way, not knowing how to go on, because your plan will have charted your course.
