Group Interview

Yesterday I had no interview scheduled. A colleague told me there were 4 guys at the door handing out their CVs and asked if I wanted to interview them. I told him to let them in and seat them. I went and found to of them inside and the others were still out. I was not sure how to proceed. Shall I ask one by one to take an interview with me? That would be fine for me and perhaps the best approach, which I am used to also. But the problem is that I'll keep the others waiting. So, I decided to make a group interview for the 4 of them at the same time! Sure it will not be as efficient as a standard one-on-one interview, yet one has to deal with different situations as they arise.

I had not heard about groups interviews before, let alone made or even had any. The idea just popped in my mind at the moment, and I was not even sure if would be 'feasible'. My previous experience in delivering training and meeting surprises that come up on class made me able to handle this situation with relative ease. I am used to dealing with new situations as they come and do on-the-fly 'planning'.

I made them sit on 4 chairs and sat on a chair facing them (without a desk in between us for better communication through body language). I then proceeded to ask them about their names, and numbered the CVs in front of me in the same order they were sitting in front of me from left to right. I then asked them one by one about their projects, tools they used in the project and other questions. Finally, I probed more with one of them who seemed to be of special interest to us because of his J2ME based project and we did need a J2ME Developer. At the end I thanked them and told the J2ME guy that we might call him.

That was the first group interview I made and it was kind of interesting yet sure a one-on-one interview would still be needed to know more about a candidate before hiring him.