Interviewing

So I've been settling into the routine of finding my replacement before I leave. I have one day next week with 7 interviews and counting, and it's been an interesting process, for sure. One thing I now know- my redesigned employment ad was quite effective in attracting interest, because the resumes are flooding in! Even in this somewhat questionable job market, I'm getting a lot more responses than anticipated. Many of them are not remotely qualified for the position, and are an easy rejection. A few of them have forgotten to include vital contact information, so they are also obviously a no-go, and a lot of them are reasonably qualified, at least as far as the resume is concerned. Then it is down to the interview process. It's up to me to design the interview. This was going to be a longer-term process, but it's been made considerably more urgent due to my move, so I've been in full-on research mode for a while now. I don't have the time or the resources to invest in a full-on study of interview effectiveness, so we're working with what we have, which is a basic structured interview format. I've updated and revised the questions, and generated a rubric for each interviewer to allow for easier scoring of answers. Each question is given a certain weighting, and at the end, candidates will be scored and avreaged in order to assign each candidate an overall score for the interview. This will hopefully minimize some of the bias issues you run into in an unstructured interview, and allow for easier selection overall. Of course, accuracy remains to be seen, but given the rate at which staff were coming and going before I came here, my hiring decisions (hopefully) can't be worse than what was already going on.

I don't think this is a perfect selection system, and it could certainly be improved, but time is severely limited, and I think this is the most workable system yet. There will be two of us performing the inital interview, myself and my immediate manager, and then shortlisted candidates will come back to see my manager and her direct reportable for a secondary interview. The final decision is not going to be up to me, which is only reasonable considering I won't be working here with him or her, but it's nice to have some input. And it's yet another thing to add to the ol' resume, so that's a plus.

In moving-related news, I think hubby and I have found our place to live. After dealing with a couple of questionable-seeming places, we found a cute little loft apartment a couple of blocks from the train line and close to downtown. Applications are in and now we wait, but we managed to get in there quickly and be the first to view the place since it came on the market, and got ourselves in right away. It feels a little odd to be trying to get a place neither of us has seen in person, but I trust my mother-in-law's jusdgement and photos, and we know the location well. Hopefully that's one more thing off the to-do list! Now I just need to find a job, although, truthfully, there are a couple of opportunities so far that I've been very excited with. Now I just have to be patient, and wait. Sigh.