HR Interview at campus - What Really Happens

We all have given many job interviews, will give many more. Experience we take from our first interview is perhaps the most memorable one for most people. And then it keeps withering, as per the law of diminishing marginal utility. It keeps getting more and more technical, HR rounds start becoming a formality and salary negotiation rounds, except for very senior profiles where detailed personality profiling is required. Let’s look at the background processes which usually plays for majority of campus interviews, things in ‘as-is’ perspective and not ‘should-be’, from an HR view.

In many ways, interviews of freshers and campus hires are done more rigorously than for laterals (those coming with some credible work experience). This is kind of a paradox. Freshers are clean slate, what’s the use of looking for any unseen hidden traits? Plus, they are trained by their institutes and teachers to have good quality answers to common interview questions. Apparently, they are so called “self-aware” at the age of 21 that they know all their strengths and weaknesses, although they have been unproductive throughout. And a 32-year-old experienced guy when asked what are his weaknesses, he has to introspect!

So, in spite of the uselessness of the interviews for fresher, we still do it. Rigorously. And we may never admit it, but we enjoy it. Sure, we give well sounding business reasons why it is vital to get the right talent at the trainee level, but power corrupts, especially those who want it. Written tests are conducted (dumps available on freshersworld.com). Then group discussions are done. I have no idea why, literally. Only logical and valid reason which justifies a GD round is an easy way of eliminating candidates from the crowd, so that the hiring process can be completed in a single day. It results in a hilariously large number of type-2 errors, which the hiring team doesn’t know. I mean they don’t know what a type-2 error is, let alone its implication.

So we are left with some candidates, pending HR and technical interviews. This is where the fun begins. It’s very hard you know, to control your laughter when candidates gives silly answers. But we conveniently forget to laugh at our own contextually silly questions. We tick some boxes in an evaluation form, which itself has never been evaluated for its relevance in decades if not centuries. We try to throw in some Shakuntala Devies. How it is relevant God only knows. Working in any organization in any capacity, is not similar to solving a puzzle, not even close. Now we try to convince ourselves and others by telling that it helps judge the critical thinking or on-the-feet thinking, but arguing with that is a lost-cause as we know how true that is, especially in a complex organization setting.

Technical interview is of far more merit, but often useless because of many reasons. We know that they don’t know anything. Still, we try to justify our selections by asking some standard questions and in turn get standard replies and appreciate ourselves that we have made a decent selection. Students rarely will be trained in company on the technologies they have studied in their college (if their college had teachers). They will rarely get work / project in the technologies they were trained by the company. So if we see this broken chain of college-training-work, interview’s assessment loses its credibility within next 6 months of joining, which is a shame.

If a quick analysis is made of past year’s new hires performance at work, the results would suggest a 50-50 ratio of success and failure (perhaps more so on the failure side). Add to that the infant attrition. In all probability it might suggest that, given all things constant in the campus hiring drive (no. of selections, visited campus, etc.) if the selections were done entirely randomly (without any sort of tests/interviews), the results after a year will be almost same (or perhaps even better) as to that of a usual controlled hiring drive. Perhaps all organizations should do this controlled experiment and check the results, to test the time and money spent on hiring team is actually resulting in results substantially different to that of an entirely random selection process.