Surviving the Group Interview

Most often you may get called into a face-to-face interview, but what happens if you have a group interview? How should you behave? What can you expect in group interviews? This blog examines two personal accounts of group interviews.

My first experience was when I applied to a major retailer in 2005 and they called me back to return for a group interview. I had no idea what that meant. I returned that following Saturday and encountered not ten, but twenty-five people also waiting for the group interview. Never in my life have I had this situation.

The doors opened, we walked into the room and sat on the couches which were set up in the shape of a circle. In the center was the hiring manager. After a quick ice breaker, she got down to business. She asked typical questions such as, “How would you sell this shirt?” or “What kind of sales positions have you had in the past?” Surprisingly, she did not direct her questions to a particular person; rather, it was directed to the entire twenty-five person group. In other words, whoever could answer the question the quickest and most coherent, would stand out from the crowd. So that’s what I did. I had to compete with the other candidates or else I would not be selected. I quickly observed how some were nonchalant and others just were too afraid to speak up, and I assumed the hiring manager made the same observation. The general tactic in this interview was basically a first-come-first-serve premise. So, if you are in this situation, be quick on your feet or else you may not get another chance.

My second experience was far more complex. This group interview was comprised of me and four interviewers, each of different managerial and supervisor positions. I noted their names and titles because I anticipated that they would ask questions relating to their positions. In a larger context, I expected I would need to correlate how one position affects the other. I should also note that we were seated in a semi-circle position. Interestingly, this situation was what they called an informal group interview because there were no prepared questions. One would start a question and then chains of questions would emerge from the other interviewers. In essence, it was more of a dialogue between the candidate and the interviewers. With each question, not only would I answer it, but I injected new information about myself and that, in turn, transitioned to a plethora of questions. However, sometimes, they would not ask questions. Sometimes they made statements and expected you to respond to that statement in an interview form. Personally, I thought this was difficult and tricky because I had to adapt to an unstructured form of interview. Similarly, I had another group interview comprised of four different set of interviewers with different titles and duties. However, this was a formal group interview because I noticed each had a list of questions on their clipboard and the seating arrangement was exactly the same as a Senate hearing.

Unquestionably, the latter experience was the most difficult group interview I had ever faced. My advice to any applicant going into a group interview is to swiftly be proactive and reactive to questions and adapt to structured and unstructured situations. Always be attentive, but simultaneously maintain professionalism and acuity.