kmayorn’s blog

Focus your final reflection on the following aspects: An overall reflection of what you learned about interviewing. If you feel that there are certain areas you need to improve in terms of interviewing skills (either as an interviewer or as an interviewee), you can mention that too:
Looking back on everything I have learned throughout the course of this semester, I feel that I have learned a great deal about interviewing and the interview process.  I never knew how many different things go into an interview.  For example, the different probing and listening styles.  I guess I always just thought of an interview as being easy and just asking or answering questions.  When really, there needs to be a lot of thought and preparation that needs to be put into an interview.  No matter if you are the interviewer or the interviewee, you need to do some research and be prepared.  

Probing is a very important aspect of the interview.  If the interviewer is not getting the information he or she is looking for when asking questions, they need to probe the interviewer in order to obtain the information they want.  With the many different forms of probing, you should always be able to get the answers you are looking for.  

I have also learned a lot about what you should avoid when being the interviewer.  Question pitfalls are something that need to be avoided.  These can make the interviewee respond with a yes or no answer when you would have liked a more informative answer.  When this happens probing needs to step into place.

Another thing that I learned from this class about interviewing, is that there is criteria that needs to be taken into consideration when choosing an interviewer and an interviewee.  I never would have guessed that this much thought would go into just choosing who to interview or someone choosing to interview me.  From what I learned in class, I now know that this is the case and it is very important in the interview process.

The final things we learned about were the different types of interviews.  For example, survey, recruitment, employment, performance (performance appraisal), persuasive, and counseling interviews.  All of these types of interviews are different in their own ways.  There are specific approaches and techniques used for each of these types of interviews.  There are certain questions to be asked as well as some that need to be left out.  

The areas that I feel I need improvement in are probably being the interviewer.  I think that I would rather just be interviewed because I don’t think I am all that great in coming up with questions to ask the interviewee.  It should be easy to come up with questions to ask someone about something you need to be informed about, however, to me I would much rather just answer the questions.  Also, based off the final interview project, I believe it is very important to be confident when going into an interview as both the interviewer and the interviewee.  Being prepared is the most important thing you can do for yourself before an interview.  Overall, I feel that this class has only improved my interview skills and will be very helpful in the future when I start interviewing for jobs or interviewing others for whatever reason.