Don't Get Screened-Out
EDS's online interview is not something you can knock out while watching Friends re-runs either. You need at least 45 minutes to answer a barrage of questions such as:
- Would you rather have structure or flexibility in your job?
- How often do you forget important details?
- How often do your decisions have unexpected consequences?
- In the past, what approach have you chosen to solve difficult problems?
- How would you react to working without direct supervision, setting your own goals and meeting them?
- In what type of work environment are you most productive?
- In the past, when you have been assigned numerous tasks with little direction, how did you react?
You get the idea. Punch in the wrong information, and you'll never hear from your dream company. But determining so-called wrong and right answers is not so simple, warns Brian Stern, a psychologist and managing director of a consulting company. Most candidates deem a right answer to be what they think a company wants to hear and a wrong answer just the opposite.
But it doesn't work that way, says Stern, who designs hundreds of questionnaires for different jobs that range from shop stewards to CEOs. Stern thinks the pre-assessment technique is the wave of the future, because it "casts a wide net" and hauls in qualified candidates. He estimates about 25 percent of candidates get jobs as a result of this process.
