In this situation, you have your best chance of landing the position for which you are applying. This is also the most common interviewing experience.
Generally, the interview will take place in the office occupied by the employer. The employer is the only one you can expect to see and is the person who will do the actual hiring.
The interviewer will have your resume or completed application in hand, and if he doesn't have questions prepared in advance he will simply draw them from the information that you have given him. In this case, he is limited by the data in front of him; data supplied and controlled by you. If you write that you once studied aviation mechanics, he might ask you about that. If you don't, he can hardly ask you about it.
In addition, if he or she is like most interviewers, what you look and sound like will be more important than the specific content of your answers. So all you have to do is impress one person under conditions favorable to you.
Single interview situations are most common in small organizations where the employer does not have a human resource person, but there are exceptions. For instance, the personnel director in a large corporation might have authority to hire the administrative assistant without having to have him or her to talk to the head of the accounting department.
Whoever conducts it, a single interview situation will be the standard. It will also offer you your best opportunity to land the job.
Round Robin Interview Situation
The round robin interview is conducted by some companies for several reasons: It generates a number of impressions of a given candidate, implying that this type of interview presents a more accurate understanding of the candidate’s ability to do the job; and, it distributes responsibility in case the wrong person is hired.
The round robin interview is particularly popular when large corporations hire management personnel. Since these employees must interact with a variety of people, and since they must often understand a wide range of processes and systems, it is thought that this type of questioning will give the most complete picture of the individual. (In actual fact, there is no reason to believe that this is true.)
Sometimes the round robin will consist of an initial screening interview at the human resource or personnel department level, followed by a final selection interview conducted by the functional department head. In this situation, it is very important to make a good initial impression on the first interviewer because: a) you won't get a chance to see the boss if this person isn't positively impressed; b) he or she will invariably provide a picture of you that will affect the department head's vision of your ability to fit in and do the job.
Less frequently, the round robin is conducted by a comparatively large number of people of various backgrounds. You are taken from one office to another and asked different questions from a wide variety of perspectives. Because each person is interested in a different aspect of your ability to do the job, the pictures that emerge of you can differ significantly from person to person; this process can pose real accuracy problems.
This system presupposes that every person that interviews you is interested in helping to fill the job. A few years ago, a major chemical company contacted me to do some advanced management training. Because it involved a number of important middle managers from around the nation, I was asked to come to the headquarters for interviews with top management to see if I was the "right man" to do the job. When I arrived, the corporate human resources director asked me some halting questions over coffee. When it became clear that he was thoroughly unprepared to talk to me, I recall saying, "Why don't I save us both a lot of time and tell you who I am, what I am prepared to do for your company, and then you can ask me anything else that I don't cover?" He was delighted to be relieved of the responsibility of coming up with meaningful questions and when I finished, he stood up and said, "Sounds good to me. Why don't we see the President?" We walked down the hall to the President's office and his secretary announced us.
The truth was, of course, that he didn't really know what was going on, and even when he found out it was obviously a low priority for him. When he talked to me, I took the lead as I had with the human resources director. I saw four other people that morning and not one of them seemed to know or care why I was there. I got the contract for the training and everything worked out well, but not because they had fulfilled their responsibility!
In a real sense, the round robin interview operates to your benefit. For one thing, the questions are practically always open-ended allowing you to control things. For another, it permits you to make a strong impression on the greatest number of people. One person may or may not hire you, even if he or she thinks you are capable of doing the job. But five people, in nearly complete agreement about your ability, will act more decisively to hire you.