INTRODUCTION:
In the process of learning about professionalism and ethics as part of the ENGR 401 course we were to conduct a selection process that would assign third year BE(Hons) students to a group project. I was on a panel with three of my peers, none of us possessing prior experience with interviewing candidates in a professional process. Consequently we were all acutely aware of the skills we lacked. These primarily involved assessing the applicants’ technical and soft skills as conveyed through their verbal and non-verbal communication.
By reading submitted curriculum vitae, CVs, making preliminary selections and conducting four minute interviews we were able to form a ranking of candidates that would best suit the project’s requirements as specified by the client.
REFLECTION
We followed three stages of ranking in this exercise with the aims of mitigating any personal biases we held against any candidate’s traits and avoiding conflict of interests wherever possible. The first stage was to rank based on the quality of CV, the second was based on the candidate’s interview and the final ranking was an average of the first two with preference given to required group skill composition.
This first ranking was easy to conduct as grammatical errors, poor sentence structure and erroneous details not pertinent to the project would push the
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Confident gestures and expressions were effective at making a candidate favourable in our rankings. Therefore I believe we were emotionally ranking each candidate based on our opinion of their abilities. After ordering, the rankings displayed just how important the non-verbal communication was in our interviews. A candidate initially ranked low due to their poor written communication made their way into our top 6 purely because of how personable they were during the