A job interview that I want to forget

My experience of attending an interview for a job in an esteemed institution gave me fodder for deep reflection. I will provide some background before I go deep into the topic. I am a mid-career professional working as a teacher in a medical college. Despite long years of post-qualification experience, I am in a relatively lower rung in my career ladder due to logistic reasons. This prestigious institution would offer me the much-needed career thrust into a higher position. Therefore, I applied for this post. 

“Good morning Dr. Gopichandran, you already have a good job in a nice government medical college in the center of a metropolitan city. How would you justify applying for this job?” one of the interviewers asked. I tried to understand why he asked this question. He probably wanted to assess my seriousness and whether I would take up the job if he selected me. He probably wanted to assess whether my reasons for applying were strong enough for me to leave the comforts of urban Chennai and a regular job to move to this new institution. However, there was no need to ask this question at all. Did he think I was going to admit it if I was just attempting the interview for time pass? Did he think I was not going to concoct an interesting reason for why I want the job? Why waste time on such inane questions, I wondered? I gave him an answer that would sound nice in an interview. It was evident that he was not convinced. There was no way I could have given him a convincing response to this question. 

 

Then came a series of questions on theoretical aspects of epidemiology and research methods. Though, I have a reasonable repertoire of research work and publications, the last I had read and focused on theory of research was several years ago. As a researcher, the more and more we do research, the less and less we focus on the theories of research. We start focusing on what we are researching, how we are doing it and the findings. Our field of interest may only demand knowledge and fluency in certain types of research which we become comfortable with. In fact, we never use some study designs and so we do not know much about them. My area of interest and work has largely been medical and public health ethics and social epidemiology and I have been mainly conducting only qualitative research and survey research. “What are the types of case control studies?”, “What is a case cohort design?” “What is this…”, “What is that…” and the volley of questions kept coming. I did not know answers for most of these. Had they bothered to study my CV, they would have known that I am not into such designs and would have spent more time meaningfully asking me about what I have done. 

 

One of the interviewers who had come online for the interview, had in fact gone through my CV. Either he had gone through it in a haste, or he had not concentrated on what he was reading when he was going through the CV. He asked me in quite a confrontational tone, “You have given a list of 5 of your best papers, and the first two seem to be on the same topic. Looks like a duplicate publication. Could you explain” Let me type out the two said papers here, 

•       Gopichandran V, Chetlapalli SK. Dimensions and determinants of trust in health care in resource poor settings--a qualitative exploration. PLoS One. 2013 Jul 16;8(7):e69170. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0069170. PMID: 23874904; PMCID: PMC3712948.

•       Gopichandran V, Chetlapalli SK. Factors influencing trust in doctors: a community segmentation strategy for quality improvement in healthcare. BMJ Open 2013;3:e004115. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2013-004115

 

The first paper is a qualitative exploration and the second one is a quantitative study on segmenting the community based on the dimensions of trust identified in the qualitative study. If only the gentleman had gone through the abstract, or done some more exploration of the titles, he would have understood this nuance. However, I am extremely grateful that he at least read the CV and found something relevant to discuss, rather than asking me irrelevant theoretical questions. 

 

Another gentleman who came online for the interview asked me “What book did you study for epidemiology?” I was totally taken by surprise by this question. Honestly speaking, I studied in Community Health Department of the Christian Medical College, Vellore. The learning there is practical, immersive and on the field. We spent barely a couple of weeks studying the theory of epidemiology over the 3 years of rigorous training. Most of our experience in epidemiology comes from the 10-15 research projects we get to work on as postgraduate registrars supervising intern and undergraduate research projects. We learn on the ground. We design novice studies, conduct them along with the students, make mistakes, fall, then pick ourselves up, learn and improve ourselves. That is the style of learning that we come from. Very few graduates from my alma mater would pride on mastering any textbook of epidemiology, but all of us go through epidemiology on the ground by conducting research studies, handling research data, and implementing public health programs based on them. I replied to him, “Sir, I did not read any book for epidemiology, we learned it by doing and discussion and reading journal articles”. The man got furious and spelt out names of a few authors and asked me to read them. 

 

Overall, the interview was a strange experience. It got me thinking about interviews and viva as a modality of evaluating a person’s competence. The way interviews are conducted in some of these institutions focus more on establishing a “knowledge gap” between the interviewer and the interviewee, rather than on understanding the competence of the interviewee. The assumptions are that the interviewer knows more, knows what is relevant and knows everything that makes a person competent in the field. Based on this assumption, the interview process keeps the interviewer as the benchmark to evaluate the interviewee. However, I could identify so many instances in today’s interview where the interviewer was not at all familiar with my domain of work, and therefore could not understand my work or my expertise. Therefore, rather than work on these assumptions and making the interview a process of assessing knowledge of the interviewee, the interview should be about a respectful assessment of what the interviewee has done, understanding their body of work, engaging with their work style, and problem-solving style. In my opinion, the best types of interviews are open ended ones which just ask, “Tell me about yourself and your work” and trying to respectfully understand and engage with them. We live in a very diverse world where different people come with different skills. Trying to measure everyone using a single scale is a bad idea. Using a single set of epidemiology theory questions to gauge the competence of a community medicine professor is also a bad idea. We should embrace complexity and focus more on choosing the right people for the job, rather than the right level of cookie-cut knowledge.