Interview to Learn

Hiring season is in full swing and lots of applicants are feverishly working hard to make themselves marketable.  I like interviewing several applicants because it gives me the opportunity to find the best employees for our campus, but it also gives me an opportunity to learn.  I am always looking for new ideas for instruction, assessment and intervention.  I also look for new ways to strengthen our collaborative culture.  There are ideas and strategies that campuses and universities are using that I have yet to discover and the only way to learn about these ideas is by interviewing products of their organizations.

Before I begin the interview, I always give the applicant an overview of our campus and the systems that pertain to the questions that I will ask.  I think that is important because I want see how the applicant thinks within our system and what types of ideas the applicant has that can be added to our system.  The key to interviewing is designing questions in such a way that elicits the applicants beliefs and experiences.  In short, interviews are a kind of scavenger hunt. You never know what you are going to find. You may find the next teacher of the year, the next idea that could solve the biggest problem on your campus or even better, you may find both in the same person.