Time for some values based interview advice, from straight out of our collection of careers-based advice on the Arras People website…
Sit down for but a moment and take a look at the outward traits you bring daily to your working situation. When I say ‘outward’, I’m asking you to take particular notice of whether or not you portray a solid value system in the way you operate in your working environment. For instance…
- Are you collaborative?
- Do co-workers look at you and see “accountable worker”?
- Are you self-motivated?
- Do you easily respond to challenges with an opportunistic vigour?
- Do you know everything already, or do you make it a point to improve?
- Do you have good planning and prioritisation skills?
- Can you manage relationships effectively for the betterment of a project?
- Do you show commitment to a company’s ethos and purpose?
Should one be able to answer with affirmed confidence these questions, they’ll likely be strong candidates for vacancies that require values based interview, value-based interview or, simply, VBI, as we will refer to it heretofore.
The eight bulleted points above are loosely paraphrased from the traits that the NSPCC are looking for when they conduct a VBI with a candidate. The children’s protection charity cited the VBI as a valuable interviewing resource for public sector/charity institutions due in part to findings of the Warner Report in 1992, “Choosing with Care”, which the NSPCC writes:
…made a number of recommendations in relation to developing more sophisticated methods of recruitment for those who work with or for children. The report stated that “employers should use preliminary interviews as a standard part of establishing a fuller picture of the character and attitudes of shortlisted candidates for ALL posts in children’s homes.”
Based on those and other revelations from the report, the NSPCC added they subsequently “began to look at developing value-based interviewing (VBI) to assess candidates’ values, motives and attitudes to work in a child-centred environment.”
Not to say that a VBI is strictly in the practice of the NSPCC; far from it. American public institutions, including universities and state governments, hold some regard for VBIs, while HR consultancies regularly advise and advertise the benefits of using solid VBI questions in their recruitment procedure.
The practice of using VBIs strike me as a page out of the old Jules Winnfield adage that “personality goes a long way.” Clearly, a job interview is meant to hone in on those matters that indicate how well a candidate would come across in their working environment (i.e. “How well can I project Mr/Mrs. Soandso into actually performing that role?”). Using VBI questions (such as those listed in the links above, or the eight bullet points from earlier) may in fact be one of the best methods to sort out the personality from the CV, and to lend due credence to traits like enthusiasm and energy for one’s line of work, especially in trust-inherent sectors such as charity, social work, and all forms of government-affiliated care industry employment.
Image © Jack Parrot and used with permission.
Twitter: saslockey
I think I do this whenever I interview but I didn’t know there was a name for it
I also know that for myself, I need to care about what I am delivering. There has to be a good match to my values and those of the project or the organisation. This was made clear to me during the 18 months I spent in banking (of which we never speak).
Great post!
It is really essential to conduct a Value Based Interview, here you can see whether a person will be productive, goal seeker, and a good team player,.. Through this you can already picture out if the person will be effective to certain task he would be assigned…
I’m looking into VBI with a view to developing some training. Does anyone have any links to further information that I could use?