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Ever fretted about what you might be asked in a job interview? Scoured the internet for possible answers to tricky questions?
John Lewis Partnership, the UK’s largest employee-owned business, is seeking to make the process less daunting by publishing its interview questions “for every role” online, “for everyone to see”.
The company’s move comes as many employers are struggling to find the right staff in a tight labour market: according to recruiter Manpower, eight in 10 UK businesses faced talent shortages this year. The group, which runs John Lewis department stores and the supermarket chain Waitrose, hopes that allowing candidates to see interview questions in advance will help them to better prepare and to perform at their best, widening the recruitment pool.
“We want the right people, from a variety of backgrounds, with the best talent to join our organisation. It makes absolute business sense to find ways of helping candidates to really demonstrate what they can do,” says Lorna Bullett, talent acquisition lead at John Lewis.
The move follows a trend for skills-based hiring in which companies assess for specific abilities rather than traditional educational qualifications.
Preview questions are useful for candidates who have the potential to excel in a role, but struggle with interviews because they lack specific skills, confidence or experience. “Interviews can feel daunting, and for some — particularly those who are neurodiverse — nerves can seriously impact performance,” Bullett adds.
Prospective John Lewis staff, or “partners”, can go to a dedicated website to find out what their interviews will involve. Questions for all seniority and skill levels are accessible.
Applicants learn they may be asked about issues from communication (“Imagine you are interacting with someone who is very different from you in terms of their interaction style. How would you go about trying to engage with this person?”) to “striving for excellence” in a leadership role (“When have you set high-quality work standards and then actively ensured that they were maintained by others?”).
The retailer is unusual in making detailed questions available from the start of the interview process, although some other employers ask applicants to prepare assignments for later-stage interviews. “It’s a major shift and it’s quite exciting,” Petra Tagg, a director at recruiter Manpower UK, says. “It could be the start of a positive new trend.”
The initiative goes further than the legally required “reasonable adjustments” UK companies must make for workers with disabilities or health conditions, such as altering recruitment processes to meet the needs of individual candidates.
It also builds on a growing trend for companies to adopt inclusive hiring practices to find high-level technical skills that interviews do not always showcase. James Milligan, global head of Hays Technology, says technology companies are among those that have started to adapt their processes. “Open questions . . . can be a stress factor,” he explains. “The more specific you can be in a technology role, [usually] the better the outcome.”
Making questions available also levels the playing field for candidates with different strengths, says Daniel Harris, director at recruiter Robert Walters. “You’re in a transparent environment, rather than ‘who can think the quickest’.”
Yet no process is perfectly equitable. Harris notes that giving more information could simply hand an advantage to candidates who can answer template questions well. Businesses should also be mindful of candidates using generative artificial intelligence to prepare answers that are not their own.
Interviews, meanwhile, are just one part of the process and are not a guarantee a company will always end up with the best candidates.
John Lewis already stipulates that candidates should expect further interrogation in the interview process in the form of “follow-up or probing questions” as well as those that are technical and role specific. “The process will be no less rigorous,” says Bullett. “Interviewers can very quickly get a sense of whether their answers are authentic and based on real experience.”
At a time when many companies are looking to boost productivity by automating some operations — including screening prospective employees — the complexity of question previews could prove off-putting to some employers.
Yet Tagg believes the approach, if more widely adopted, will lead to better hires and more efficiencies in the long term. “What organisations are hopefully recognising is [the importance] of finding the right candidate and retaining them.”
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