Group Interviews?

Post Reply New Topic

I've never been in a group interview-- and didn't know they really existed-- but I have one next week. It's for a non-profit that deals with children's mental health issues. From what I read online, it seems like group interviews are more like presentations by the company. Anyone ever done one? What was it like? Come, share your experiences...

They seem to be the new thing in corporate culture. More people to grill the potential noobs, multiple heads to uncover weaknesses that a single interviewer might miss. Needless to say, the few I've been through felt more like inquisitions than interviews. But I work in IT so I think that is what they are intended to be.

Hopefully it will be a lot different in the non-profit world.

Hey, thanks. People are always looking for the next great thing in torturing potential employees, aren't they? I think it's actually a group of us, rather than a group of the employers. Which might be better, unless we have to compete against each other. I was in an interview like that once-- shudder.

Group interviews! Are not the regular ones terrible enough?

I had a group interveiw for a casino one time. Here's what they did to me and teh BF:

They took us in in groups of six. We sat down at a table with one interveiwer. She first asked us general information questions, like names, ages, where we were from, yap yap. She then moved on to the interveiw. Of course the standard 'Why do you want to work here' popped up. She asked the question once, but each person had to answer individually. So it really felt like you had to one up the bloke before you. Then she asked a few other questions. These were individual, meaning only you answered it.

IT. WAS. HELL.

OMG worst interveiw I ever went to! Not only did you feel like you had to one up the guy next to you, BUT THEY GRADED YOU ON LISTENING. And of course NT's think listening means looking at the speaker, making eye contact, yap yap yap. Needless to say I failed.

This is probably the worst interveiw strategy I have ever seen. I really hope your interveiw isn't this bad OP...

This is precisely one of those reasons why official DX's are useful. There are laws in place to prevent discriminative practices in hiring or in the workplace, and this clearly discriminates against HFA and AS folks trying to get jobs. It should be made illegal.

I agree - most AS people find it far easier talking one-to-one and struggle in groups. This means a group interview will generally put them at a disadvantage and could easily be considered unfair.

I had a group interview at the zoo. They had 20 people go into a meeting room, each applying for one of four different jobs.
I had to fill out a questionair, personality/behavioral test, and math exam. Then they asked us all the same questions and went around the group. Most people repeated the same answers ("also along those lines"). I hate doing that so I said "pass".
Then they asked us to pick a different number between 1 and 25 and asked a situational question like: "what would you do if you saw a fellow employee not working as hard as they should."
"what is a challenge you have overcome?"
I found I wasn't the only aspie there. But none of us got the job.
They hired a bunch of extroverts. A few weeks later they were fired because they socialized too much and didn't get much work done. The zoo still hires extroverts over introverts anyway. They just don't learn. I hate group interviews and biased companys.

Would you really want to work for such a bunch of fools? Maybe they should get their chimps to run the next lot of interviews. It would make just about as much sense by the look of things.

Thanks for the comments, y'all...the interviewing place is far away from the place where we'll be working...so maybe everyone else will get lost...hmm...

Hi,

I have a group interview on Monday and am absolutely dreading it. From what I've read they're going to give us all different scenarios and then we have to say what we'd do in that situation. The only thing thats keeping me from cancelling at the moment is that my current job sucks and I really want out of there.

Good luck with the interview

I had the interview...it was really strange because everyone there was applying for different positions, and there was no one else there applying for my position. So the interviewers were asking about skills that I wouldn't even need to have for my specific job. For me, the worst part was that we had to 'jump in' with our responses. I'm not good at that. If we'd all gone around the table or something with our answers, I'd have been fine...