Interviewing in itself was already complex but COVID has made it even tougher. For starters, there is an absence of face to face interactions. Detractors may say that why not use video calling. Well, it is not as simple it may seem! Sometimes it may be very difficult to decipher some of the complex body language parameters. Poor network makes even listening difficult and many interviews swich to telephonic after initial 5 minutes.

The question that arises is that in this new normal, how do we ensure the efficacy of the interviewing process to ensure that the quality of new hires is not impacted. The solution is to develop a robust evaluation process to ensure 360-degree comprehensive evaluation.

One of the tools of developing a comprehensive interview toolkit is an aptitude test. Aptitude test is one of the archaic tools to gauge candidate competence but it is still relevant in today’s world. Aptitude tests such as GMAT, CAT etc are used around the world to test users.

In this article let us discuss on the need for and best practices for developing aptitude test.

• How to use: Aptitude tests should be used as the preliminary screening tool to filter job applicants.  It could be safely said that aptitude tests can help filter about almost 50-60% of job applicants

• Duration: Aptitude tests should be for around 20 question in 20 to 30 minutes in a timed environment. It is not advisable to have longer aptitude test as it could lead to user fatigue.

• Grading: Aptitude tests should be run over a diverse cohort to obtain a statically significant average and employers may choose to shortlist candidates in the 75th quartile. It would be better to have minimum 30 users give tests and obtain thee results (statistically significant)

• Format: Format could be a multiple-choice questionnaire

• Content: Aptitude test should cover a mix of logical reasoning and quantitative test. Certain roles (inside sales, content writing etc) may require strong written communication skills and may require questions that test grammatical, vocabulary and comprehension skills. These skills come handy irrespective of the function. A salesman may have to quickly calculate on whether he should accept a customer offer or a plant operator calculating the reorder level.

A comprehensive evaluation of a job portal could be a tricky question to answer. Before we answer this question, lets step back and understand the perspectives of the two parties here – job seeker and recruiter. There is a lot at stake for everyone. The recruiter wants the job-seeker to be successful. The cost of a wrong hire pushes project milestones back. Eventually the recruiter is responsible On the other hand, the job seeker views the new job as a path to advance long-term career goals and sometimes even survival,

• Intelligent recruiting: Intelligent recruiting involves use of AI, ML, chatbot and other digital means that enables recruiters to quickly search the right talent. It also means better controls to ensure genuine jobs are posted and certain basic hygiene standards are maintained. Top sites in India that offer such intelligence are iimjobs.com, Nextjobnet etc. 

It would only be fair, if we first identify how people search jobs in real life

• References: It is estimated that almost 60% of the jobs are filled through references. A referrer could be a person who could vouch for your style of working. As the stakes are very high, both the job seeker and recruiters are looking for a comfort zone that is reassuring. A person recommending someone can be a powerful tool. The questions sceptics that may ask is that what are interviews for? Interview are a way to evaluate candidates but an interview may be short-lived

• Online job search: Searching jobs online is another way of finding jobs. Click-Search-Apply! An ideal job portal should have option for job posting and resume discoverability. Job posting implies an opportunity to post jobs. Resume discoverability gives recruiters an option to search resumes. Top sites in India that offer such searches are Naukri.com, monster, Nextjobnet etc.  

• Social Network for jobs: Although social networking is similar to references but the means to references through digital means have added a new dimension to traditional references. Social media provides an opportunity for people to share thoughts and showcase talent. Social media leaves a permanent digital footprint for other to follow. Jobseekers can connect with recruiters of their dream companies, showcase their talent and pitch for the opportunities they deserve. Top sites in India that offer such searches are LinkedIn, monster, Nextjobnet etc. 

Based on the evaluation above, the best job portals in India would need to meet the criteria below:

• Portals that allow social networking
• Portals that have strict controls to ensure genuine jobs are posted
• Portals that allow us to apply to jobs!

Following are the best job sites in India:

• LinkedIn
• Nextjobnet

A difficult question that you may come across in a behavioural interview is about weakness. A candidate would want not want to disclose his weakness as it may hamper his chances of success in an interview. At the same time, he has to mention areas of improvement. Herein lies the trickiness of this question. Damn if you, damn if you don’t!

Let’s get a perspective into why the interviewer wants to ask this question. In corporate world, no one is perfect and an employee sometimes may have to work on some of his improvement areas. The interviewer wants to assess whether the candidate is likely to accept his weakness, take a realistic stock of them and then devise a time-bound action plan to work on them

“Tricky question !”

Step-Wise approach to answering the weakness question:

• Identify skills required for the job: Skills could be soft skills such ad communication, people leadership as well as technical skills. Skills required for fulfilling the job may be mentioned in the job description. If not, skills may have to be assessed based on the tasks to be completed. Another way of assessing skills for the job is to ask people who have performed such roles in the past.

  Let’s take the example to assess the skills required for an account executive

  An accounts payable executive may require soft skills such as advanced business written communication, oral communication, public speaking skills, cross functional skills, knowledge of accounting standards, experience of handling auditors, knowledge of ERP and experience of interacting with vendors

• Arrange the skills in the order of priority: The next step is to arrange the skills in the order of priority starting from the most important:

  For instance, in the above case for an accounts payable executive, the skills required may be arranged in the order of priority (most important comes first) as below:

  1. Experience of interacting with vendors
  2. Knowledge of ERP
  3. Advanced business written communication
  4. Oral communication
  5. Knowledge of accounting standards
  6. Cross-functional skills
  7. Public speaking
• Select the least important skills relevant for this job: In the case above the least important skills are cross-functional skills and public speaking skills.

  For instance, I need to work on my public speaking skills. I feel that public speaking is very important as one takes leadership roles. I plan to enrol in the local Toastmasters club to enhance my public speaking. I will be enrolling in the public speaking online course in Coursera to learn the finer nuances. I plan to see videos of leaders such as Obama, Narendra Modi to supplement my skills. Finally, I will actively seek put opportunities at work to improve my public speaking skills. I hope that through these steps, I can improve my public speaking skills in a period of 6 months.

• Mention Actionable steps done till date: In case the candidate has already taken any steps to improve upon his weakness, he should mention that.

  For instance, the narrative above could be modified as below, I plan to enrol have enrolled in the local Toastmasters club, last week to enhance my public speaking skills.

Tips :

• Non-negotiable skills: Certain skills such as soft skills may be given such as good written or oral skills may be assumed to be given. Hence it is advised not to mention these as non-negotiable skills. Also, for certain roles, certain skills may be essential such as communication skills
• Prepare 2 to 3 weakness: Prepare 2 to 3 weakness using steps mentioned above as some interviewers insist on 2 to 3 weakness

One of the most frequent questions asked in any interview is: Tell me something about yourself. This question is asked generally at the beginning of the interview and sets the tone of the interview. It is believed that interviewers form a perception in the first few minutes of an interview. This would imply that since this question is asked at the beginning of the interview, it could be a make or break question that would play a a crucial role in determining the outcome of the interview process. Let’s discuss on how to excel while answering this question.

Before we start to discuss strategies to answer this question it is imperative to understand what the interviewer is expecting from this question. The interviewer has shortlisted you based on the resume. But now he wants to meet the person behind the resume. As he hears you talk, he visualises on know how this person communicates, how can he be the best fit and how will this person handle the relevant stakeholders and situations based on his past experience.

With this background, the interviewee needs to carefully plan for this question. The best tip is to consider this question as an elevator pitch This question should be answered in approximately 3 to 5 minutes. At this moment, the interviewee needs to draft a response to this question. The important stages of answering this question are planning, mapping and designing. Let’s discuss on each of these phases in detail.

“Consider this question as an elevator pitch”

The first phase in answering this question is to research on the company’s background, industry outlook, promoters, KMP (key management people), the job profile, company specific events such as mergers, divestiture, new product launches etc. The Management Discussion and Analysis section in Annual report, transcript of earnings call, glassdoor reviews, wikipedia or simply a google search on Company can be a good source for such information. For privately held companies, financial statements can be easily downloaded from MCA site in India Similarly, company employees, current or past, can be a good source to research. A vital tip is to research on the interviewer – look up on his interests, past employers, key projects etc. It is acceptable now-a-days to ask HR the names of the interviewers.

The next stage is mapping. In this stage, the candidate has to map the knowledge gathered in the planning process with his profile and experiences. In this step the candidate curates his skill, experience to the role requirements.

Instance 1, The Company is going through a divestiture process and the candidate has relevant experience in the past organisation. In this case, the candidate should highlight this in his initial brief.

Instance 2, The interviewer and the interviewee share a common employer / Grad school / hobby. It makes sense to highlight this link subtly to establish a talking point and build rapport.

Instance 3, The interviewee has handled roles of similar size, complexity and has relevant people management experiences. This should be highlighted as part of career story.

The final stage of the process is designing the structure of the answer. The answer need not be a chronological sequence of events starting from grad school to the last role. One way of answering this question is to start from first employment and highlight one critical project (maximum upto 3 as identified in mapping stage) in each employment / role change in the STAR approach (Refer separate article on STAR approach), follow up with synopsis and end with a line on personal interests. The synopsis could be at the beginning or the end to accentuate the impact.

A pictorial representation of this layout could be as follows

Introduction
Job A: Role 1 and key achievement in STAR FORMAT
Job B: Role 1 and key achievement in STAR FORMAT
Job B: Role 2 and key achievement in STAR FORMAT
Synopsis
Personal Interests

A sample: Tell me about yourself answer could be as follows:

I pursued Company secretary and a gold medalist.

After completing my company secretary, I worked in Grant Thormton, one of the big 5 accounting firms, in public accounting as an executive. In a fast paced environment, I led a team of 2 to complete the audited of a listed entity with $260 MM revenue and with 18 subsidiaries. This project helped me work extensively on client communication as I helped to manage an internal change of auditors with a critical client.

I moved to Amazon, one of the top e-commerce companies of the world, as I was to explore opportunities in other areas of finance. I started as the AM and single handedly managed a $58 MM Prime entity. I also took a leadership role and worked with Global director to identify the best practices to set up the $ 10 MM utensils business in India for the first time.

I excelled in my role and was given the responsibility of complex $ 1 billion flagship Amazon Web services entity with people management responsibilities of a team of 7 people. I got an opportunity to go to Shanghai to do a UAT on the SAP ERP implementation. This project not only gave me opportunity to be exposed to different cultures but also got a view of how cross functional projects are led.

In 2015, after completing my MBA, with a short span of 6 months, I got the responsibilities Finance Controller of the start up Joint Venture of Amazon with Reliance. I got to work in the entire gamut of finance beyond my core domain of accountancy and work in teams with senior management. One of my key achievements is that I was recognized as the employee of the quarter.

Over a period of 7 years In Dow, I excelled moved from an Assistant Manager to a Manager and now to a Senior Manager. I lead a team of 10 people and am I have been ranked as an outperformer in 3 consecutive years and the employee of the quarter.
I am go getter and have a proven record for project management. I have a natural flair for leadership and I can collaborate with others for superior results. I am adept at conflict management. Finally, I am high on ethics and pride on being a continuous learner.

Outside work, I like to collecting coins and travelling.

A popular framework useful for several interview questions is the STAR Framework. STAR is the acronym of Situation, Task, Action and Result. This framework can be used to answer questions around failure, achievement, conflicts, ethics etc. Moreover, the logical nature of framework could be successfully used to tackle unexpected question in the interviews. If you are asked a lot of counter questions after your responses, it is likely that you are missing some aspect of this framework. For instance, if after your answer, the interviewer asks you a counter question about the outcome of your efforts, it means that you have missed the result part of the framework while answering the question.

The best way to practice initially is to label part of interview prep into the buckets of Situation, Task, Action and Result so that you do not forget any of these critical aspects. With time, you will get accustomed to structuring your thoughts by using this framework.

Let’s discuss different facets of this framework along with an example.

Situation: Situation means the circumstances that you were facing at the time of the situation. Situation would generally be other work priorities and deadlines that you were facing at the time you got this task. This helps the interviewer to understand the background and perspective that you faced while handling this situation.

Example of a situation: So, this was when, I was the finance controller of the JV and was busy in raising funds after lengthy discussion with Amazon Global and RIL Senior Management team.

Task: The next step is to describe the exact problem that you were facing at the time of the interview.

Example of Task: Around this time, the COO of the 1.6 mm Amazon-RIL Start up JV resigned and I was made the interim head of operations. The business was not delivering results and the staff were demotivated

Action: Describe the specific steps taken to compete the task

Example of Action:

• The primary issue facing the business was to bring the business performance in with the budgets. it is important for me to consistently deliver results and maintain healthy working environment. To counter this, I brought in some significant changes. I first ushered credit policy so that we could increase the target base of our customers.
• Secondly, the low employee morale was pegging us down and hence I conducted extensive one-on-one meetings with the COO’s team of 12 and requested them to stay focused.
• Finally, because the targets were pushed top-down, I adopted a collaborative approach and took the input of the sales team to understand which markets could be targeted and how we could target them.

Result: Please specify the result you achieved because of the steps you took. It is advisable to quantify the results in value terms or percentage terms. Please specify any award you received from achieving this task.

Example of Result: These efforts meant that within 3 months we increased the sales by 30%. My efforts were recognized and I was awarded with the best finance employee out of a team of 42.

One of the toughest questions that you will encounter in a behavioral interview is about failure. The question gives interviewer a fantastic insight into the individual’s approach, mindset, behavior, reaction towards failure. An interviewer also wants to understand whether an individual is willing to admit mistakes and learn from them. Given these facets, this is one pf the favourite question of the interviewers. Let’s delve into these aspects.

Before we dive into the nuances of answering this question, we need to understand why the interviewer wants to ask this question. In corporate life, failure is inevitable. There is hardly anyone who would not have failed atleast once in a project, task etc. Many projects inevitably end into failures. Interviewers are looking for candidates who can take failure in their slide, pivot or even learn from them.

“Toughest question”

Here are some of the Do’s and don’ts to be followed while answering this question

Do’s

• Focus on learning: It is important to focus what you learnt from your mistake. So, focus on the key lessons from a failure and show how applied you this learning in another scenario. It is understandable to fail but it is more important to learn from mistakes and apply these in a new situation. Once bitten, twice shy!
• Acceptable stories: Focus on a skill gap, functional inefficiency or learning from experience. Also, address the means adopted to address the skill gap
• Adopt a STAR- Situation, Task, Action and Result framework: Refer article on STAR framework to have a coherent framework to answer this question.

Don’ts

• Do not try to mask your success story as a narrative for failure: Some candidates try to showcase one of their success stories as a failure. A failure is when you have fallen flat on your face, defeated comprehensively and left with nothing much to salvage. Candidates who refuse to admit failures are perceived negatively. These candidates in their corporate life don’t accept failures, play blame game or try to cover up. No one wants to have such candidates in their team. Adept interviewers may even try to lure you into the trap of shifting the blame to someone else. Please don’t fall for it!
• I have never failed! Please do not say that you never failed in any pursuit. We all experience failures in our life. Saying that you have never failed implies that you have not retrospected enough on your experiences and reflects badly on your preparation or indicates you do not want to admit your mistakes.
• Avoid non-negotiables: Avoid mistakes around the areas of legal issues, ethics and integrity

Example of an answer to failure question

There was an incident in which I attributed the failure of a JV to myself, as I was unable to factor in the external variables that were instrumental in determining the viability of the venture. Through my research, I observed that the growth of the online game industry in India was more than 20% and if our JV could secure 10% market share over the next 7 years, then we would be growing at 30% and recommended that we continue the business despite initial setbacks. However, I had failed to understand the ground realities and was only focused on facts and figures.

Ninja was the technology partner in this venture, while Funskool had the role of strengthening the existing distribution/client network to tap the market; and I had not factored in on the latter’s capacity to leverage the customer/distributor base. Additionally, I did not have a contingency or remedial plan that could have helped us overcome the inability of the Funskool Management, as they were mainly into the children business and did not have strong connections in the online game business.

After hearing me out, the Global Business Director stated that it was not feasible to change the current business operations and he decided to fold up the joint venture but this incident also questioned my capabilities and business acumen. I realized my weakness in decision making at top management level.

However, this failure was not completely futile as it instilled valuable learning for me and since then, I have always prepared business plans in conjunction with the business realities. In fact, I applied my learning later when I came across an issue of piled up intercompany creditors. I segmented the overdue based on the reasons for non-payment, and one of the primary reasons was the non-payment of goods purchased on high sea sales. I worked with supply chain to clear these dues and also had detailed discussions with business, supply chain and customer service representative to identify the reasons underlying the failure. I put a new process in place with timelines for providing the documents and aligned it with the stakeholders and their leaders. I also set up a monitoring mechanism in place to ensure there wasn’t a single overdue related to high sea sales in future.

Most of the interviews generally end the interview with “What questions do you have for us?” It would be a big mistake not to ask any question and say that you don’t have any question to ask. This is the best time for you to ask any query or get clarification from the interviewer. Generally, interviewers don’t like if you don’t ask any question to them. At the same time, it is important to ask pertinent and good questions to impress the interviewer. This question gets even more critical then you are interviewing for the second or third rounds with senior executives.

In corporate life, individuals need to have the courage and the business acumen to ask the right questions. No one individual has the complete knowledge of the entire business process. This information can only be obtained by asking the pertinent questions.

How many?

It is advisable to keep list of at least two questions ready to be asked to the interviewer. Some of the questions tend to get answered during the course of the interview hence on the safer side it is always advisable to keep a couple of questions ready with you. It may also happen that during the course of the interview, you get new questions that you need to ask to the interviewer but you need to keep a list of questions ready before hand. At the same time, please ensure that the number of questions to be asked to the interviewer do not exceed 3 as the interviewers may not like if you ask too many questions to them

“Interviewers do not like if you don’t ask any questions!”

What not to ask?

Do not ask any questions that can easily be answered by doing a simple google search. Although of the interviewer may still answer the question, you may lose brownie points for not asking a good question and for not doing adequate research on the company. Similarly, do not ask any question on how the interview went or whether you will be shortlisted. If you are interviewing with aa non-hr manager do not ask a question on salary.

What to ask?

• Recent news on the company is one of the good areas to ask a question. For instance, you could ask how the new acquisition could strengthen the existing portfolio products of the company.
• Similarly, questions that resonates with the background of the interviewer maybe good to ask. For instance, if you are interviewing with the head of R&D, questions around innovation may be good to ask.
• Another question that you can ask is how the role would evolve over the next 5 years. This question I would give you a very good sense of what the company has planned for you. This question also indicates to the interviewer that you are looking at this job opportunity from a long-term perspective.
• A good question to ask is how a day would look like in the new role. This question would give you a very good insight into how your average day would be. It also helps you to unravel facets of the job that are not mentioned in the job description.