SchnookoLoly

As I said, I think it more has to do with the degree helping to point to someone's discipline, capacity for learning, and so on, and so forth. If you're looking at young or younger applicants then this is really the only indication you have of this. If, on the other hand, you are looking at someone with 20 years of experience, then it's different. While every job posting at our firm had requirements for degrees, that requirement was more flexible as you moved up the totem pole. Senior Managers, Directors, and Partners didn't necessarily have degrees (though the majority did!).

Eddmac

Fair enough, although for me a young person with 4 years work experience and excellent references would be more interesting than a person with a nothing degree, in fact I would be more likely to interview a person with experience and references than someone with a degree and none.

I know of far too many people that dossed through their degrees and I wouldn't take having a degree as meaning you have any discipline at all, but I suppose we all work with our own life experiences and no-one can really be faulted for that.

SchnookoLoly

This was part of the reason for our "tell me about a time when" interviews. We looked for experience outside of just a piece of paper. Not necessarily work, but extra-curriculars, university committees, sports committees, part-time jobs, summer jobs, etc. Just having a degree wasn't good enough - you had to demonstrate that you had a range of experiences both inside and outside of school in order to get hired with us.

There was one guy, for example, who had graduated with a business degree and had worked for the UN during his summers. The guy looked great on paper, I went into that interview thinking for sure this guy was going to fly though the interview. However, every friggin question I asked him, he just responded with his experiences fly fishing.

"Tell me about a time when you worked as part of a team."
"In my fly fishing club, I dealt with ... ... ..."

"Tell me about a time when you took initiative on a project."
"In my fly fishing club, I organized x event... ... ..."

"Tell me about a time when you worked in a difficult situation"
"In my fly fishing club, we had declining membership... ... ..."

I even said to him at one point "okay, all your examples so far have been about fly fishing. Can you give me another experience?"

I asked him something else, he hummed and hawed, and then talked about how people from his fly fishing club did something or other in his polo club.

I'm just like, dude, you spent 5 years at university, and you worked at the UN in New York City. Come ON.

He really had no ability to demonstrate any of the qualities we were looking for... and thus he didn't get put through to a second-round interview.

dbd33

Did any of his stories involve a flute?

Eddmac

lol, that's classic.
Did you contact the UN to see if he actually had worked there?

I have had some interesting responses when I checked up on peoples references :XD:

SchnookoLoly

Haha, he did not!

I didn't, that sort of thing was done by another department. If I had put him through to second round I would have flagged that sort of thing as I did find myself wondering about it.

I found out afterwards from someone else who was in the same pool of applicants that this guy had been bragging through all of the first stages of the interview process... bragging about how he'd graduated from some big-name US university (can't remember which offhand) and then had worked at the UN and this and that and the other thing...

And then he didn't make it through the first round.

He was apparently quite shocked when his name was not announced as one of the people who would be progressing to the second round of interviews.

Easily one of the worst interviews I've ever been in.

BristolUK

I had my own crack ready but it just didn't compare to that masterpiece.
So if not Mr Annan, perhaps it was JR Hartley?

scrubbedexpat091

Getting in the door is the hardest part, and with computer screening programs now screening resumes it's pretty near impossible to get past the computer system if it's set to screen out resumes not indicating they have a degree or meet the min. educational requirements.

At the companies I worked for, the resumes screened out were automatically deleted from the system so hiring managers didn't even have access to them, they only had access to the one's that passed the initial computer screening.

Even once it your performance can be perfect with excellent reviews and not move up without a degree, there is almost always a co-worker now with a degree with just as good of a review from their supervisor.

scrubbedexpat091

I can never answer those questions, I've ended interviews because of them. I simply can't answer some of them, and no point in trying to lie and make something up.

Joys of working in such rigid work environments, most of the questions asked were not relevant to any of my jobs, or happened so long ago I have forgotten.

I feel like saying, man I spent 5 years loading airplanes, I spent my entire time at the airport, I had no time to do anything else, I could not go outside of my scope because we were union, doing anything but my job would result in discipline. Yes I could have showed initiative and went to help the gate board instead of sitting outside waiting, *however* that would have gotten me and anyone else not in CSR union written up, so we had no choice but to sit and just watch and wait.

How many are going to risk their jobs?

Then in hotels doing auditing in the middle of the night, seriously, I just sit all night, do some spread sheets, print some reports, make sure the ledger is balanced, and then literally I do nothing else for 6 hours but wait for the day shift. I would usually do other things because I was so bored like cleaning the lobby and such, but nothing spectacular.

I hate hate hate this sort of interviewing, along with those aptitude tests that are impossible to pass. If a company does one during the application process, I know they will never call, and they never do.

dbd33

I'm with you here. This type of gushing irrelevance:

irritates me greatly. <<<snip>>> If you don't fit the exact social class of the interviewer you cannot interview well in that circumstance. If you were poor you wouldn't have been on a sports committee, you wouldn't have been on a team that won the America's Cup, but you might still be good at accounting and you might value turning up, doing a good job, being paid for it and going away without being gung-ho'd to death.

SchnookoLoly

And as for the rest of it, quite the opposite. I didn't care if you won America's Cup, or were on a sports committee, simply that you gave a RANGE of experiences as your answers.

Tell me about a time you had to make a difficult decision. It could be ANY decision. I actually didn't care what the decision was, I just wanted you to talk through how you weighed options, how you examined choices, what choice you made, and how you look back on it.

Only worked with baggage at an airport? Fine! Give me a few experiences from that, and then some from your social life, then some about living in the U.S. And moving to Canada, and so on.

Most of the time I was more interested in the thought process. With the aptitude tests it was the same thing, a simply problem solving question. One example (keeping in mind this is IT consulting), you are working in a dentist's office and he asks you to design a table to keep track of clients and patients. What kind of data is important to capture? How do you structure it?

A lot of the candidates had never worked with databases, but had worked with excel, so I just wanted 4I hear how they'd approach the problem, what kinds of things they'd consider, what kinds of data is with capturing, etc. No trick questions or anything, just come up with a game plan and as long as it was logical, even if it wasn't necessarily complete, it was just showing you had a general understanding of how this kind of thing might work.

Howefamily

Exactly what I am looking for when interviewing.... Maybe it's an accountants thing. Who knows!

bats

I hate those interview questions and never do well in them. I can't sit and spout flattering pre prepared speeches about myself for 10 minutes or so. I don't how this presents an accurate impression of the candidate.

BristolUK

Ditto.

I saw so many work colleagues get promoted ahead of me because they "interviewed well" with the strangers (not even HR specialists, just people out for the expenses associated with promotion boards away from their normal workplace) who made the decisions in our promotion exercises, while they had shown a fraction of the competence I had shown in the job and in several extended/repeated periods of working temporarily in the higher grade and having my managers universally recommending me for promotion time after time because they knew they could rely on me.

bats

I think you are more likely to get to know a candidate if you have a discussion with them, ask the daft question if you must but at least interact with the interviewee. The most telling interview I ever had was a day long interview that included lunch with the other candidates and the interview panel. That was hard work.