the laboratory interview for graduate students, post-docs and PIs
Whether you are interviewing others for a job or you, yourself are being interviewed for a job, it is not a bad idea to know what kinds of questions are asked and how. In this post, let’s consider the general approaches that are taken in interviews. I was browsing through the book At The Helm: A Laboratory Navigator
There are several styles of interviewing, some of which most P.I.s might find too manipulative and distasteful. For example, stress interviewing subjects candidates to difficult and hostile questioning to test their reaction to thinking under stress. Other techniques are more useful and can be incorporated in your interviewing protocol. Behavioral interviewing assumes that, if you can really find out what happened in the past, you can predict the future. Asking questions about how candidates dealt with a difficult project or with other people at a previous job can suggest how they will act in your lab, and these types of questions will probably form the basis for your interview.
Personality profiling attempts to define candidates’ underlying personality by analyzing their responses to questions about real or theoretical situations. An example of this would be to ask, ‘Upon finding out that a close colleague had fudged data, would you approach the person or go directly to the P.I.?’
Another technique that is actually part of many postdoc interviews is the situational interview, when the candidate is placed in a situation that might actually be on the job. Giving a seminar and having to field questions about one’s own experiments much as are done day to day, is an example of this. Some P.I.s do give a test or request a demonstration of a technique from candidate technicians.
The only kind of interview that has had any consistent success in predicting performance in the workplace is the structured interview, in which all applicants are subjected to the same questions and are rated according to predetermined objective scoring (Gladwell 2000). The questions should examine past or present behavior to try to define the candidate’s ability to do the job and to predict future performance in the lab.
excerpted from At The Helm: A Laboratory Navigator
In the course of interviews, though, you may use or experience (depending on which side of the interview you are on) any of these approaches. In my experience, the stress testing has largely fallen out of favor as it usually turns applicants off and can result in interviewers losing a lot of good applicants for the job. If you are the interviewer, consider what kinds of approaches (and in what situations) you will take. If you are going for interviews, consider how you will react to these various approaches.
In stress interviews I’ve found that questions are often based on fallacies or they are just illogical. So, as the interviewee, you just have to pick out that fallacy or the breakdown in logic and calmly answer the question by addressing those weaknesses in the question. When it comes to personality profiling, I’ve found that you just have to be yourself. There often is no right or wrong answer to these questions so it’s best to just say what you would actually do. With these types of questions, I sometimes will ask the interviewer what he/she would do. With experience you may notice that most people seem to expect one particular answer to a specific question. Whether you agree or not, it’s up to you to decide how that should impact your own opinion. The situational interview can sometimes be “interesting”. You are basically called upon to do your everyday activities but this time you’re being evaluated! It’s weird, when you’re doing your everyday work, sometimes you just “do” but when you’re being watched there’s a greater component of “think” that’s included, which can throw you off of your rhythm. So before you go on your interviews, try preparing by practicing some of your everyday activities (or at least those you would be expected to do on the new job) with the mindset that someone is watching you–i.e. really think through what you are doing rather than letting muscle memory take you through it.
Finally, the only way to prepare for the structured interview is really to think about as many questions as possible that could be asked. After you’ve conducted or been on a few interviews, it becomes pretty obvious that there are subset of questions (still a long list) that are often adapted in one way or another to every interview. I will address these in the next post…
That’s right–always keeping you hungry for more! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
