Employment interview should be to provide honest, comprehensive information

Unsatisfactory employer-employee relationship
A candidate who successfully sells herself to a compan will be unhappy if that company discovers that she IS notqulified r fit for the position. Similarly, a company WhICh receIves an applicant in order to hire him will have an unhappy employee when the truth emerges. Thus the third purpose of the employment interview should be to provide honest, comprehensive information. The interviewer must allow the interviewee to decide whether he wants to join the company as it is ; the interviewee must allow the interviewer to decide whether to hire her as she is. Deception or omission by either party usually leads to an unsatisfactory employer-employee relationship.

Procedures: Taken chronologically, the steps of the employment interview include planning, beginning, questioning, and closing.

Planning: The first step in planning an employment interview is to determine the criteria by which applicant will be judged. Shouksmith (1968) emphasizes the importance of detelmining the "critical requirement" for a job and suggests that four to six factors or abilities be listed to assess interviewees. In hiring a receptionist, for example, we might determine that the factors most necessary for success are friendliness, politeness, attractiveness, and intelligence; we then would look for someone possessing those traits. The interviewer must know what kind of person she or he is seeking, and developing a list of critical requirements seems to be a useful method for specifying desired traits.

A second step on the planning stage involves selecting the types and sequence of questions to be llsed. This step is somewhat controversial; some writers argue that each interview should be tailored spontaneously to the

individual applicant. Research suggests, however, that many advantages lie with careful preparation. Wagner.(1949) and Mayfield (1964) both found that highly structured interviews allow the interviewer to make more reliable judgments among all the interviews she or he conducts; hence the interviewer is more likely to select the best candidate. Although some flexibility is necessary within each individual interview, the interviewer therefore should plan the general outline which the interview will follow.