Imagine it: You’re sitting through the eleventy-ninth candidate interview for a residence life position. You’re staring at your notes, trying to remember whether it was Candidate #14 or Candidate #17 who said their passion was “connecting with residents.” Or was it “resident connections”? Everything is blurring together. Your notes are turning into a string of key words resembling the Google search history of a madman. You look up and think, There has to be a better way!
Whether you’re interviewing student or professional staff, there are ways to add interest and variety to the traditional Q&A interview format. Adding an interactive element doesn’t just keep interviewers engaged through the repetitive process of meeting many candidates, it also gives candidates a chance to mentally stretch, demonstrate different skill sets, and even shine in unexpected ways.
Here are some interview activities, unconventional questions, and new components that can breathe new life into your next interview process.
The Group Decision
Adding a group component to your interviews is a nice option when you have a larger number of candidates. We’ve had a lot of success using a simulation activity where participants receive a set of character descriptions and must work together to select five characters to populate a colony on an unknown planet.
This exercise gives candidates a chance to show off their conversational skills, advocate for and justify their ideas, compromise with others, and show general collegiality with peers. It’s not really about the decision they make (the simulation has no right answers) but about how they collaborate to reach a consensus. We’ve really appreciated being able to observe candidates when they’re more relaxed and are interacting naturally with their peers.
The Hypothetical Project
Why not take a real-world project you’ve been challenged by and pose it to candidates? Provide an overview of the project, a few parameters and resources, and time to develop proposed solution. For example, we’ve given candidates a copy of our hall government training schedule and asked them to design a version that could be completed in fewer days.
In this instance, candidates were able to demonstrate their knowledge of key student training concepts as well as their ability to manage time and prioritize topics. When we debriefed, they often referenced their own experiences with staff training—an important responsibility for this particular position. They shared what had worked for them in the past, which allowed us to explore their experiences more deeply than a typical interview question might.
One thing to keep in mind: depending on the complexity of the project, this idea may be more appropriate for a professional staff interview, where candidates normally have more experience to draw from.
The Teammate Trait Prompt
Perhaps you don’t have time to add a new component to your interview process. Instead, try introducing an unconventional question or prompt. I’ve noticed that student candidates can sometimes race through their interview questions. Nerves, limited experience, and lack of interviewing savvy can all contribute to an interview that feels like a sprint.
In a process for a highly collaborative position, we presented candidates with a list of 20 traits commonly found in effective teammates: patience, creativity, reliability, integrity, motivation, and more. Candidates were asked to select three traits that they believed they would bring to the team and explain how those traits would show up in their work.
Shaking up the pace and flow of the interview gives candidates a chance to pause, catch their breath, and switch mental gears. (Pro tip: we laminated a physical copy of the list and gave them a dry erase marker so they could circle or mark their selected traits!)
Bringing New Energy to Your Process
Making your interview process more interactive doesn’t have to involve bending over backwards. It can be as simple as providing some variety to your Q&A format or integrating a more complex activity. Both interviewers and candidates benefit from seeing someone “think out loud” and process differently. The next time your interview process starts to feel a little too routine, try mixing things up. You might just discover new insights and maybe even turn those interview blues into interview WOOs.
