The Globe and Mail

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.”

Last spring, Ms. Aaronson joined close to 600 other medical-school applicants to take part in McMaster's MMI. She had worked as a consultant in the medical field, but knew this would be very different from every other interview she'd had.

“For a corporate interview you research the job and the company,” she says. “For med school you might brush up on answering why you want to be in medicine. That kind of prep isn't useful for this.”

In the MMI, the assessors are drawn from the medical faculty, current students and members of the community. Community assessors have included a former mayor of Hamilton, a high-school principal and a part-time copy editor for the Hamilton Spectator, Ross Longbottom.

“I take it very seriously,” says Mr. Longbottom. “You are actually getting to choose someone who could be standing over you with a scalpel one day.”

Dr. Rosenfeld says community members bring the patient's perspective to the table. He suggests a company could include customers in the process.

Elizabeth Holland, owner of Career Council, a Toronto interview-coaching firm, believes organizations are open to changing the traditional job interview. But she cautions that the time and expense of setting up multiple stations with multiple assessors could hinder MMI's acceptance within companies.

Right now, she says, MMI “would likely work for those rare senior executive roles, where a corporation is willing to invest a significant amount of time and there are a large number of stakeholders in the process.”

Her company examined the MMI after receiving inquiries from medical-school applicants wanting to be trained for the process.

“Some of the main advantages [of MMI] are the lack of bias based on any one particular answer, that it is difficult to prepare for or ‘fudge' and that you get an exceptionally wide range of opinions on each candidate,” she says.

Career Council will begin offering coaching for the MMI later this summer, but Ms. Holland acknowledges that part of the test's appeal is that it's hard to study for.

“If you have no idea what's coming you have a fight-or-flight response,” she says. “So what you know is what you know, and who you are is who you are.”

After her initial shock from the connect-the-dots exercise, Ms. Aaronson was able to see the value of that particular station, and the MMI as a whole.

“Within a couple of minutes I had an ah-ha moment,” she says. “We're getting into a career fraught with the potential for miscommunication and frustration. It's a pretty valuable tool to see how people react in these situations.”

Ms. Aaronson apparently reacted well – she's currently finishing her first year of medical school at McMaster.

Special to The Globe and Mail