Shyamal Majumdar: When interviewers become interrogators

HUMAN FACTOR

Stress interviews are designed to test how a candidate handles his emotions.

Imagine a situation where you are facing a group of interviewers silently staring at you, or asking questions in a hostile tone, or changing the question just when you start answering it. There may be more.

You are, for instance, a qualified engineer from a premier institute. One of the interviewers asks you to draw a very basic diagram. You find it strange but still keep a straight face and draw it. But your agony does not end here. The interviewer may just laugh and tell you that even a school kid can do better than you. To top it all, the interviewer may also start challenging or criticising everything you say. Yet another method could be the "hot seat" technique. Questions are asked from all directions. A couple of interviewers may pop in suddenly from the door behind you and start shooting questions even before you had the time to look at them.

Sounds bizarre? Feeling insulted? Want to just walk out or give it back to the interviewers? Hang on. You are just going through what management experts call "stress interview" where interviewers take on the role of interrogators. Quite a common practice in businesses such as consulting, marketing or investment banking firms, stress interviews are most often used for jobs where frustrated or aggressive clients will challenge you in similar ways. Firms want to see if you remain cool in the face of adversity and think well on your feet.

The purpose is to test how the candidate handles his emotions. In short, the company just wants to find out whether the candidate has the calculated ability to handle potentially stressful situations. HR experts say academic brilliance alone isn't enough for high pressure jobs. The logic of stress interviews is candidates who perform well under such pressure and in such a hostile situation will perform similarly on the job.

Stress interviews also include rapid-fire questioning, unwarranted criticism of your past work performance, long pauses in between questions and so on. For a marketing job, for instance, companies often use the following method of stress interview. The applicant will be called in much after the scheduled time. After the initial hello and so on, the interviewers won't utter a word, leaving the candidate fidgety. "The purpose is to see whether he has the ability to initiate a conversation in such seemingly hostile situation," an HR consultant says.

The method adopted in these interviews is similar to tactics used in high-level negotiations in real-life situations while sealing a marketing deal. The questions are also designed to give the interviewer an opportunity to observe the real you rather than listening to a rehearsed answer. And the point is there are no right or wrong answers, only honest and confident answers. For example, there is no harm in recounting an experience where you have failed, but used that as an opportunity to learn.

A senior ad industry executive with about 10 years experience recalls his interview with the creative director of the company he joined three years ago. The first question he faced was "What's a good ad?" After he gave an answer to this rather vague question, he was asked to answer it again. After the fourth time, the executive calmly walked up to the board and started drawing diagrams to illustrate his points.

"Being a veteran in the game, I realised that the interviewer was only trying to unnerve me and figure out how I react to his obviously stupid behaviour. After all, being in a service industry, we have to deal with a lot of moneybags who are permanently unhappy with the quality of our work without understanding what they are talking about," he says.

Stress interviews have many critics, too, one of them being the dubious impression that they leave on the candidates. One HR consultant says stress interviews are nothing but idiotic innovations by some so-called hiring experts who earn a living by creating clever hiring tests just to impress clients. At a time when talent is in short supply, good candidates will ask interviewers to get lost if they are put through such apparently humiliating experiences. "These days interviewers are under stress chasing top quality candidates. Forget stress interviews," says the chief of a leading head-hunting firm.

Companies that adopt stress interviews, however, contest the assumption. Most companies organise a debriefing session at the end of a stress interview to ensure that the interview does not create a negative impression about the company or leaves a psychological scar on the candidate. Stress interviews, they say, can be a powerful opportunity to demonstrate your problem-solving abilities to a prospective employer.