Emily Aaronson entered the room and sat in one of two chairs placed back to back. Another person sat in the chair behind her. Each was handed a piece of paper covered in small dots.
“My partner's dots were numbered and mine were not,” Ms. Aaronson says. “He had to talk me through how to connect the dots.”
The pair worked together, and eventually the person observing the exercise let them in on a little secret: “It turned out we were looking at totally different dots,” Ms. Aaronson says. “My knee-jerk reaction was, ‘Are you kidding me?'”
Far from being a joke, Ms. Aaronson's behaviour during the exercise would help determine whether she would be admitted to medical school. The connect-the-dots task was part of the interview process for McMaster University's Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine in Hamilton.
In 2004, the school introduced what it calls the Multiple Mini Interview, an evaluation process for medical-school applicants created at McMaster that is now being adapted to the corporate world. The goal of the MMI was to go beyond the traditional question-and-answer session.
“We were really dissatisfied with the process for admitting students to medical school,” says Jack Rosenfeld, professor emeritus of pathology and molecular medicine and co-creator of the MMI. “There were students that got in and maybe shouldn't have. Clearly, these people knew how to interview well.”
In the five years since it was introduced at McMaster, MMI has radically changed the way most Canadian medical schools evaluate and select students. It is being used by 12 of Canada's 17 medical schools, as well as schools of dentistry, nursing and midwifery.
The MMI format has also spread to England, Australia and New Zealand.
Now, Dr. Rosenfeld and his colleagues want to bring MMI into the corporate world.
McMaster is helping to incubate a start-up company, ProFitHR, based on the MMI methodology and materials. ProFitHR hopes to attract companies as licensees, and in the process change the corporate job interview forever.
MMI works by having applicants move from one mini-interview to the next. At McMaster, students pass through 10 to 12 stations, each operated by an assessor who grades the applicant's performance. In addition to teamwork stations, such as one with the dots exercise, applicants are asked to discuss ethical questions or participate in scenarios acted out by current medical students.
“We recognized that our biggest problem is not in evaluating the cognitive domain – it's not about knowledge,” Dr. Rosenfeld says. “It's the interpersonal domain: the way of dealing with people. It's about ethics and it's about judgment.”
He says the current corporate job interview process, in which the applicant answers questions posed by potential future colleagues, is an inadequate way to evaluate how a candidate will perform in the job.
MMI focuses on evaluating “soft” skills, what Peggy Klaus, author of The Hard Truth About Soft Skills , defines as “attitude, integrity, ability to communicate ideas, ability to get along with people, and give and accept critical feedback,” among other traits.
“People who give job interviews are often not taught … how to ask the right questions and to listen and observe a person's non-verbal communication,” Ms. Klaus says. “This is not a good way to bring somebody into a school or organization.”
Prior to creating the MMI, McMaster was using a traditional interview process. Dr. Rosenfeld says some colleagues referred to it as being “no better than a crapshoot.”
“Once they are out of medical school, a physician that runs into trouble is tragic and horribly expensive to sort out,” Dr. Rosenfeld says. “I imagine the same thing would be true of the wrong VP at the Bank of Montreal.”
