What is the purpose of the HR interview?

by Carl Mueller

People often like to marginalize the HR (human resources) interview and treat it as being unimportant and a cakewalk. In my experience, treating the HR interview like this almost guarantees you’ll fail in the interview.

In my experience, it’s technical people who tend to treat HR interviews with disdain and go into the interview with the attitude that “the HR person interviewing me won’t know what I’m talking about and everything I tell them technically will be over their head.”

In general terms companies usually schedule HR interviews to get a soft-skills evaluation of potential employees and to ensure they are not only getting a person who knows the job and fulfills the specific requirements but is also someone who “fits” the company and its culture.

Plus it’s another way of comparing candidates against each other if they get down to two or more candidates and can’t figure out which one to hire.

HR interviews are often maligned for being ones that ask simple questions (although some HR interviews can go this way if the person conducting the interview isn’t particularly good at it) but I can also think of human resources staff who literally had the ability to prevent someone from being hired even if the hiring manager wanted that person.

In some cases, I’ve seen HR staff whose interviews are actually the most difficult part of the interview process. In these cases, the person being interviewed has no trouble with the hiring manager but falls down when they’re put in a different position and are forced to rely on their soft skills when interviewing with a human resources rep.

Bottom line: if the company includes the HR interview in the interview process, I’d treat it seriously and assume that the company does, too.

For more information on HR interviews that I previously wrote, check out my November 1 post on HR interviews.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

Tagged as: HR, human resources, job interview

  • Roblearns

    Yes, but what is the purpose of the HR interview? I don’t think you adequately answered the question, even if you’ve mentioned some of the pitfalls of not treating it seriously.

    I’ll take a try at the answer: it serves no useful purpose and is an outgrowth of internal corporate politics. The person doing the interview cannot qualify you, because they lack the knowledge to ask appropriate questions.

    Some companies put existing internal employees through the HR interview when posting for jobs – in this situation, toss out any belief you may have held about whether the person is a corporate ‘fit’ – if they’ve already worked at the company for a decade, and can only post for a job if they are in positive standing – how strange is it, that companies still do an HR interview.

    It’s rather a waste of time, and the HR department can make themselves a stumbling block in terms of hiring the right person. And therefore the conclusion can be made, that sometimes HR departments cause harm in terms of getting the right talent into a position, and they certainly add to the randomness of the hiring process.

    The reality is, people who are not good at interviews – might be the best employees you’ll ever hire, because in many positions such as technical, the skill needed is not ‘fitting in’ or ‘acing interviews’ but is about something completely different, like finding an error in logic among 100,000 lines of code. You either have that talent, or you don’t – and HR really has no ability to help in finding the right person, because their value system and knowledge base if of no help.

  • Carl

    Hi Rob

    Thanks for your detailed comment. When you ask “what is the purpose of an HR interview,” the answer is that it depends on the person you’re interviewing with. Certainly not every company treats it like a fluff interview. I’ll give you a specific example: While working in recruitment, one of the biggest customers we dealt with had an HR manager who first interviewed every single person applying for a job and trust me, it was not a fluff interview. She was a hard-ass and weeded people out and did a very good job of it. And the hiring managers loved her. Actually we as recruiters liked her too because while we knew she was tough, she was also fair and if you did well with her chances are you had a good shot at the job because she knew her stuff. I don’t recall this company hiring people that either quit or got fired several months later so their hiring success rate appeared to be very good as far as I could tell.

    I can also think of HR staff who used to do the job they were interviewing people for so when you talk about technical positions, I can think of numerous experiences where the HR person was essentially hiring someone to do a job they themselves used to do. Certainly this doesn’t happen all the time but I’ve seen it happen.

    You mention that there are people who are simply not good at interviews and this is very true. The opposite though is that there are also people who are very good at interviews and who can trick and lie their way through the process. That’s why it can help to have an HR person like the one I mentioned above to weed them out.

    At that the end of the day though I always told candidates that they had a choice. If they didn’t want to attend interviews that had an HR component, then don’t go. Let someone else get the job.

    Carl

Previous post:

Next post: