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
