Mr Collins: Thank you for coming in today at such short notice John.
John: I am glad to be here.
Mr Collins: As I told you on the phone we need to recruit someone for this position as soon as possible and based on your resume we hope this will be you. Today, I would like to find out a little more about you.
John: Of course. Well, as you can see on my resume I am working as an office administrator at the moment. My main duties are to make sure that the office functions smoothly and that all of the staff have what they need. I have to check the supplies every week and submit an order for anything we are running low on.
Mr Collins: Do you have any academic degrees or industry certifications?
John: I studied Business and Administration. I also attended several training courses on various IT packages.
Mr Collins: Excellent. And are you open to further training?
John: Definitely, one of the things which made me apply for this job was the fact that you mentioned the training possibilities.
Mr Collins: Wonderful. Could I ask why you would like to leave your current job?
John: There are actually two reasons. The first and the main is that I would like to develop myself further and I think the best way to do that is to work somewhere else. Also, the atmosphere in the office is quite bad at the moment as the new manager has dismissed several long-time staff members with no obvious reason and hired a few people he used to work with in his previous job.
Mr Collins: I can imagine that staff motivation must be quite low at the moment then.
John: Yes it is.
Mr Collins: Ok, as you know this position is a little different from your current role in that as well as office administration you would also be responsible for organizing training sessions for the staff. Do you have any experience which is relevant to this?
John: Well, not with organizing training but in my previous position I was partly responsible for organizing different events.
Mr Collins: What kind of events? John: Mainly social events like integration meetings but also some more official events like welcome sessions for trainees.
Mr Collins: What did that involve?
John: I had to arrange food and drinks and make sure that the schedule was full and included a mixture of activities to keep the staff interested but the hardest thing was trying to make sure that any management who were scheduled to give a talk actually came and did it.
Mr Collins: It can be difficult getting a superior to do something they do not want to do.
John: I'm sure that some of the organizational skills I learned in that work would be useful in this job.
Mr Collins: Yes, well that all sounds very good. If you are successful here, would you be willing to work a 3 month probationary period before we offer you a full time contract?
John: Yes of course.
Mr Collins: Great. Well, we do have one other candidate to see today but as long as your references are all OK, I think you should be quite confident of your chances.
John: That's great.
Mr Collins: On your way out could you stop at reception to fill in one of our internal recruitment forms?
John: Yes of course.
Mr Collins: It is really just the same information as on your resume, but we need it for our records.
John: No problem. Thank you for seeing me today.
- What other questions should Mr Collins have asked?
- Tell us about a job interview which you have had
- Which is more important: qualifications or experience? Why?