Stress-testing the jobseeker at an interview

The corporate environment often holds a lot of unpleasant surprises for newcomers from college and sometimes even older jobseekers with sufficient work experience but who are from alien industries.

The daily career challenges peculiar to corporations differ from business to business and from department to department in the same set of business environment.

Individual employees too have varying levels of stamina and react differently to stressful situations. The stress level that one candidate may find normal and within a zone comfortable for their mental health and wellbeing may occasion a near-heart attack in another person. 

For a certain personality type, pressure is the fuel that runs their system. Persons like these tend to do well when the pressure is on and may feel disillusioned and bored when half as much volume of work is at their disposal. 

When your job description is a loaded one and the challenges for dealing with nearly every single item on the list that forms the job description is routine but with varying degree of sophistication, you are sure you need someone with a workaholic set of attitudes to be able to excel at the position.  

The position that requires the ideal candidate to travel extensively while working at the same time will obviously be ideal for the adventure-seeking person with a robust personality and one constantly in bed with stress. That same position will be injurious to the personality with similar amount of drive and energy but without the travelling adventure spirit and a desire for geographical conquest. 

One of the traditional ways of testing the pressure resistance of jobseekers has been to submit job candidates to an overloaded aptitudes test that requires test takers to correctly complete as many problems as possible within a time frame that is obviously too short for the test. Candidates who are able to correctly work out the most number of problems are separated from the rest and passed on to the next set of evaluation. 

The rationale for this kind of testing is to tell the amount of pressure and workload candidates can bear within a specified time, especially if they are being screened for positions that frequently expose them to this nature of pressure. Banking and finance, law practice, lecturing, sales and marketing, numerous engineering professions, medical practice, managing businesses, reporting and a wide range of jobs not mentioned here demand a lot of stamina from employees on daily basis and are usually professions that subject new prospects to this kind of stress evaluation. 

Another interesting manner of getting around to achieve the same objective is to subject shortlisted jobseekers to marathon interviews during which the interviewee is stretched beyond their preferred limit of endurance. Such assessments take several phases, and may last many hours. During the course of the day while the assessment is underway, the reactions of the individual candidates are recorded, their energy levels are measured and how they deal with annoying stressful situations are all entered into the evaluation chart. 

Well-endowed corporations that have vast resources and so can afford setting aside large budgets usually go for more complicated but fairly more predictive-value tests. The outcomes of these tests are often more reliable and their power of prediction more valuable. 

Engineering companies that specialise in the service and maintenance of mainly heavy-duty machinery which are usually deployed in mining and other remote areas have their own style of assessing the stress resistance capacity of their aspiring employees. After the first round of screening, the candidates who are shortlisted for the next set of tests are sent to the mines or construction sites (as the case may be) for a short period of time. 

While there, candidates are exposed to the daily challenges of their jobs. The jobseekers are assigned tasks depending on what their specialties are and offered rigorously busy schedules of work and timelines. After this brief period, the results of the tests are forwarded to the head office where the final stage of the screening is held. 

Those found to be unfit for the challenges of the new positions are sent home while the preferred ones get to do further screening exercises. In a few cases, some candidates themselves request to opt out after the practical test sessions because they realise that a task as the one they were evaluated against may not be one that they can handle.

Work sampling scenarios like the above are usually extended to white-colour positions in typical corporate setup. When a company decides to opt for this kind of tests of fitness, a workstation almost perfectly identical to the position up for conquest is set up. Where the company can afford to set up as many sample workstations as the number of candidates vying for the position, each prospect is handed a sheet of paper with specific instructions. 

A sampling workstation for a branch manager of a quasi-financial institution may ask the interviewee to start the week by leading a meeting of the branch to review the previous week and plan for the one ahead. The second item may ask the candidate to telephone to arrange a meeting with a high-value, aggrieved customer later in the day. From here they may be asked to send electronic mails of specified themes to many destinations. Some of these emails may be official while other may be not-too official yet important to the prospect of the business of the branch. 

Candidates may be asked to hold a long telephone discussion with a senior officer at the head office, arguing their case for recommending a query, transfer, promotion and even dismissal of a subordinate after the test taker has read a corporate case study said to have taken place in the branch they head. 

Finally before the test is over, the jobseeker will have to hold that important meeting with the aggrieved valuable client and be able to get them to rescind their earlier decision to close their account. All these exercises may be taking place within a time frame often inadequate to deal with the emergencies in real life situation. 

Every business has its own approach to candidate selection and may generate its own in-house techniques for determining which prospects are fit to come on board and which ones have no sufficient stamina to stand the daily heavy doses of stress that a position is home to. Whatever stress test method the HR decides to opt for, care must be taken not to unnecessarily stretch candidates. 

Tests of stress must be relevant to vacant positions and must take account of the varying individual capacities to deal with the challenges that are simulated for the purpose of the test. When a test taker begins to show signs of extreme discomfort, whatever the nature of the test, quickly discontinue the exercise. GB