The successful candidate will report to the manager (that's you!) of the newly formed Vitamins Matter Too (VMT) team which is part of a national organization.

The team is tasked with auditing the cafeterias in the organization's operating units to measure vitamin levels in the food and provide advice on menus and preparation.

It is expected that the VMT team will grow in number, and in two years or so will have the capacity to offer the service outside of the organization.

As the newly appointed manager, you have been asked to recruit an Office Manager whose job it will be to manage the Audit templates, the actual Audit documents, and organize a schedule between the operating divisions and the VMT staff.

This is a key role in the success of your VMT team. Your boss has stressed that she doesn't want to see you in your office all the time and expects you to be out in the field gaining experience, refining the VMT service, making a name for your team, and achieving her corporate objective of superior nutrition for the organization's employees.

You can see your VMT team is going to depend on the Office Manager, who will be the person organizing schedules and documents.

You will need to rely on the Office Manager to keep the operation running, and you may feel a concern that your reputation will be in their hands. Trust is essential, but these interpersonal issues rarely make it to the job description!

In reality, HR would prepare a full job description, job specification, and skills requirement. There would be a full set of questions with follow ups to assess the candidate.

The simulator uses a simplified skills specification.

The following are the skills you are interviewing for in this interview simulation:

You will be scoring the candidates on the basis of these specifications. The interview questions follow next to give you an idea of what to expect from your own HR department.

Each question relates to the same number job skill in the previous section. The follow-up questions to each question are sub-bulleted:

Take some time to familiarize yourself with the skill specifications and their associated questions. Do you see how the follow-up questions ask for more specific detail allowing a better judgment to be made of the candidate's skill?

The candidate's answers provide the information for the interviewers to fill out the score sheet. You must do this in the interview. You can always review your scoring after the interview, but if you don't score each skill during the interview, you will forget pertinent information.

Instead of copying out all the information again, I can explain how the score sheet works using just one of the skills from the list.

The score sheet will have all the data such as the candidate's ID, the date, and the names of the interviewing panel. You have no need to think about that as your HR department will use a standard score sheet.

Typically, the sheet will show a skill, a space for your score, a factor, and the total for that skill.

Some of the skills in the job skills specification may be more important than others. To make the scoring easier for the interviewers, you are usually scoring on a scale of 0 to 10. If that particular skill has been given a weighting factor of 2 and you mark the candidate as a 7, then that will be worth 14 points in the final score.

You collected the score sheet from HR and all the factors have been agreed and settled. You can't concern yourself with the factors in the interview. Your job as the interviewer is to assess the skills on the basis of the candidate's answers to the questions.

Now I'm going to show you how to do that. I'm going to take you from a skill for the job, through the questions and answers, and show you how to judge the score for that skill:

That is a claim that you now need to test with the follow-up questions. Now you ask the question: Can you tell me about a style template you created please?

Observe the candidate closely. Are they remembering or inventing? Are they still relaxed and body mirroring? Do they take a long time to answer or is the answer immediate?

The candidate answers slightly awkwardly: "I made a style template for the kids' swimming club I help organize."

You may now judge that "thoroughly conversant" was overstating the skill in the candidate's first answer. You need to decide if the candidate was just nervous or was trying to mislead you. You may also think that some volunteering role experience of a Word style template is still valid experience.

To answer that question—is the candidate's experience sufficient—ask the next question: How would you improve that template now?

The candidate could answer that no improvement is possible or a particular modification would be helpful. You need to judge what the answer means.

Given the previous answers, how would you score "no improvement possible"? Either the template is perfect or the candidate lacks experience to see the improvement possibilities. Are you doubtful that the template is perfect? This would suggest that the candidate is not that experienced with style templates but has at least produced one example for the kids' swimming club.

The candidate has shown a basic ability to create Word style templates. You know what your VMT team are tasked to do. There are document styles to create but not that many. The styles need to be correct to give the right image and you will be approving them anyway. How would you score this candidate? Would you score them a 6, 7, or 8?

Given the advice in the tip, let's discount the 8, leaving us with 6 or 7.

What do you feel about the candidate's "thoroughly conversant" answer? If it was nerves, I'd propose a score of 7, but if it was an attempt to mislead, then perhaps 6 is more appropriate, or even 5 if you feel that strongly about it.

You can imagine a number of different candidate answers. Work through what you would look for to support or discount those answers. You can use the dialogue we have just worked through to give you more ideas.

Not all the answers will be quite as convoluted! Now for a straightforward example:

This may be another attempt to overstate the candidate's skill. How does this answer compare to the "thoroughly conversant" answer? "Yes" is much more direct. Now you need to do all the observations on eyes and mirroring and move on to the next question: What data sources have you used?

The candidate answers straight back: "Access and Outlook."

Does this feel like an honest answer? The response was quick. You need to test a little more to make the judgment. You ask: Which data source did you find easier, and which one more difficult?

The candidate answers immediately: "Outlook and Access are fine. I haven't used Excel much and find that difficult sometimes."

Do you think this is an honest, balanced answer? It is possible that admitting a weakness in Excel is a smokescreen to hide a complete lack of experience in mail merge! Is the candidate keeping eye contact with the interviewer during this answer? Are they fidgeting or looking uncomfortable and untrustworthy?

The candidate's answers have been delivered quickly and with a seemingly balanced view. This would suggest the candidate is being truthful, as only the most accomplished fraudster can maintain a false impression in an interview. How would you judge this?

Would a score for this skill as a 7 or 8 make sense? This leaves room for a better score if a subsequent candidate has all the abilities the questions seek.

There is an art in crafting interview questions which your HR team will have prepared for this interview. The interviewer has a responsibility to get the "most accurate answer" from the candidate. Sometimes, that takes some perseverance:

Is this a sensible answer do you think? So far so good I think, but we would want to dig deeper. You ask: What do you do if too many messages are coming in at once?

The candidate replies with some uncertainty: "I would make a list and say I'd call back in a little while."

That sounds like a reasonable answer. How do you feel about the candidate's ability to work accurately under pressure? Are you convinced? Are the candidate's answers or style affecting your decision?

You ask the next question: Do you know your limit and are you ready to ask for help when needed?

The candidate answers quickly and with a hint of pride: "Yes, the service call administration is quite busy, but we do get unpredictable surges in demand. If there has been a TV program about the dangers of letting the servicing slip we get a storm of requests. When I see the requests running at a high level for half an hour, I call for help."

This is a positive answer, and it feels like the candidate is being truthful, don't you think? This answer is from the candidate's current job behavior and should be a good predictor of how he or she will behave for you. Would you score this highly, 7, 8, or 9?

This final example shows the interviewers struggling to reach a scoring decision:

Your VMT team needs to be scheduled by the Office Manager, and an Excel spreadsheet seems the obvious way. This lack of Excel experience in the candidate is a little worrying. You ask the direct question: Have you used Excel to make a simple schedule?

The candidate responds quickly with a "No", probably showing some signs of embarrassment that they can't match that need.

Do you think you could easily train this candidate to create and run schedules on Excel? You have a good feel by now of the candidate's abilities with Access, Outlook, and Excel. You need to make a judgment on how to score this person.

You ask one last question: Have you used Excel to make lists, of priorities for example?

The candidate answers: "Yes, as I said, for expenses. I also made a list of tasks for my manager to prioritize last month."

It seems clear that this candidate has little experience of Excel, although they could probably be trained fairly easily. How would you score this skill? The skill that is being tested is specific, and the answer was "no". Perhaps a score between 3 and a generous 5 is appropriate?

The interview process is about hearing evidence from the candidate, testing it with follow up questions, and then judging the result.

The simulation we have just worked through is just like a real interview. The only difference is you aren't trying to observe the candidate's behavior and manage the interview to schedule at the same time!

Pause to reflect for a moment—you just worked through your first job as an interviewer. Your head may be spinning at the moment from your thoughts about the process. The interview simulation is worth re-reading several times. You will find new questions, new angles to explore each time. The more you think and judge, the more experience of interviewing you will take to your first real one.

If I have done my job well you should be feeling much more confident now. Just like a flight simulator, you have experienced and learned some key things about interviewing. They don't let you fly solo at first and you won't be interviewing alone either for the first time.

We still have a few things to cover in regard to good interviewing practice.