Along with attending classes, running for student council at the University of Toronto, and holding down a part-time job, 20-year-old Aidan Nulman spent the last few weeks obsessing over a four-page document that could land him his dream job for the summer.
The position is a paid internship in New York with Seth Godin, the acclaimed marketing guru and bestselling author of books such as Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync? The sole application requirement is to send a PDF document of no more than four pages. "You decide what's on it; that's part of the application," Mr. Godin wrote when he announced the job.
While the majority of companies still adhere to the standard practice of sitting a candidate in a room and giving him or her canned questions, innovation and creativity have begun to creep into the process. In today's job market, candidates are more likely than ever to be thrown a curveball when applying for work.
Though undoubtedly a unique hiring process, Mr. Godin's internship application is not a departure for a man who once wrote a blog post that declared, "I've been to thousands of job interviews (thankfully as an interviewer mostly) and I have come to the conclusion that the entire effort is a waste of time."
Reached by phone, he elaborated.
"If you use a standard interviewing process, then the people you hire will by definition be good at the standard interview process," he says. "But there are very few jobs where being good at a job interview is what you do for a living."
Mr. Godin and others like him are doing their best to evangelize for the end of the typical job interview. They see it as a structure that rewards candidates who do well in interviews, as opposed to in the job itself. It appears the message is getting through to some Canadian companies.
"Some of the younger organizations like 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, who are entrepreneurial and high-growth, are embracing a lot more untraditional techniques," says Drew Railton, a partner at The Caldwell Partners International, the country's largest executive search firm, and president of the B.C. Human Resources Management Association. "They will bring five or six candidates in a room at the same time and interview them en masse to see who performs best."
Even seemingly staid professions such as finance and accounting are changing things up. Jean-Philippe Gauthier, recruiting director for Robert Half Finance & Accounting, a placement firm for finance and accounting workers, says the scarcity of talent has led companies to evolve their hiring practices.
"One of the things people started to do is speed interviewing," he says, noting that companies can't slowly evaluate finance candidates over weeks or months because others will hire them first. "Companies take four or five candidates and interview them for 30 or 40 minutes. If a candidate fits the bill, they bring them back for a long interview."
That longer interview, currently the standard, has some flaws. Mr. Gauthier says studies show interviewers make up their minds within the first 12 minutes of the discussion, so much of the interview can be a waste of time. Recent Canadian research identified other problems.
"We found that 78 per cent of interviewers are actually prompting people [with hints] in interviews," says Geoffrey Smith, the assistant dean of the college of management and economics at the University of Guelph. Along with Sheldene Simola and Simon Taggar, two colleagues from other Canadian universities, he studied how job interviews were conducted in Canada. Their research was published in the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences last year.
Mr. Smith says 75 per cent of interviewers added new questions for some candidates, meaning not all were evaluated based on the same information, which is the point of a structured interview process.
