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The interview is still the main tool in selection, and rather ironically the pressure put on users of psychological tests by the Sex Discrimination and Race Relations Acts may lead to even more emphasis being placed on interviews—despite the questions raised about their effectiveness. The research literature on interviewing is substantial and covers a wide range of variables. Strangely, however, one element of the interview situation has scarcely been touched by this research and that is the interviewee. The picture one gets from most studies is that of an inert lump of material being placed in front of the interviewers for them to respond to—the candidate is simply a passive source of information, and the real interest is in how the interviewers go about eliciting and processing this information. Some researchers even dispense with real candidates altogether, preferring to use written pen‐pictures which the “interviewers” assess.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how employers can get the best results from job interviews.

This paper considers the relative merits of structured interviews, behavioral interviews, experience-based interviews and situational interviews.

This paper explains that each type of interview has its place, dependent on the type of job to be filled.

It is revealed that proper preparation by employers can help them to get the most suitable candidates.

This paper reveals how employers can learn to conduct effective interviews that produce reliable results.

This paper aims to widen knowledge of and explore how convergent interviewing can be used to identify key issues within an organization.

This paper introduces the convergent interviewing technique and describes the method of selecting the interview subjects. The construction of a round of interviews is explained. The content of the interviews is described and the particular probing nature of the questions demanded by the convergent interview process is explained. The ways to analyze the full set of interviews for groupings or categories is also described. The case study example of a broad research question about influences on work behaviors in a local government council is used to illustrate the convergent interviewing technique.

The key issues revealed by using the technique can be subsequently used for a variety of research and consulting purposes and settings. Convergent interviewing is an effective research method, which conserves resources.

Convergent interviewing enables researchers to determine the most important and/or key issues within a population rather than a full list of issues in an organization or barriers to change in a particular organizational context.

This study was concerned with relationships between selected candidate characteristics and both candidates' immediate reactions to interviews and interviewers' evaluations of them. Candidates' self‐reported academic performance was unrelated to their immediate reactions to interviews. Candidates whose academic performance was poor were judged to be weak candidates by interviewers. Interviewers also saw these candidates as less intelligent. Candidates who came from working class background were more highly motivated to succeed and also tended to be more anxious before interviews. However, social class background was unrelated to interviewer judgments. There were a number of relationships between candidates' recollections of their affective responses during past interviews and their immediate reactions to the interviews studied here. Compared with other candidates, those who had disliked being interviewed in the past were more anxious and less confident about their interviews and also liked interviewers less personally. These negative affective responses were also associated with poor evaluations from interviewers.

Purpose – This chapter reflects on selected issues raised by the emotions involved in the social relations of qualitative research. We use experiences from two separate studies to explore the role of emotion and affect in the embodied, face-to-face encounter of the interview; the ‘translation’ of interpretations of emotional responses from one cultural context into another; the reflexivity of the researcher and the researched and the ethical implications of this form of research.

Methodology – The studies, one doctoral research and one funded by a Leverhulme grant, took a qualitative approach, employing individual semi-structured interviews with young people in Zambia and women in their fifties in Swindon, UK.

Findings – The chapter argues that emotions within the interview are bound up with the potential meanings and outcomes of the interview to both the researcher and the interviewee. Emotions affect what is said and unsaid in the interview; what is communicated and hidden and how the material is interpreted.

Originality/Value – The chapter brings together experiences from conducting highly emotive research in majority and minority world contexts. It focuses on similarities in the dilemmas posed to researchers by the emotions involved in the social relations of research, regardless of location.

Through an analysis of texts and interviews with sanctuary providers from sanctuary incidents in Canada, this paper first details how sanctuary is made possible by pastoral and non-state sovereign powers. It then argues at least three stories of law are instantiated in sanctuary discourse. Law is at times arbitrary and unpredictable. In other instances, a ‘higher’ law authorizes sanctuary. Law is also a broader game in which lawyers are relied upon and sanctuary becomes a tactic to ‘win’. These legal narratives work together to constitute sanctuary and are instantiations of pastoral and sovereign powers at the level of the subject.

In this book the terms ‘clean language’ and ‘clean language interviewing’ are written using lower case, according to the convention of the American Psychological Association (sixth edition). ‘Clean language interviewing’ is sometimes abbreviated to CLI.

Much qualitative research is interview based, and this paper provides an outline of qualitative interview techniques. This paper explains the rationale for using interviewing as a qualitative technique. Various types of qualitative interviews, seven stages of interviewing, preparations needed for conducting interview as well as the skills of interviewers are discussed.

Focusing on an interview conducted with a Bedouin respondent on the subject on genetic counseling, this paper offers a symbolic interactionist framework for juxtaposing theory and practice, research and implementation, observation as well as intervention. The analysis exposes the interview as an arena for negotiation using constructs such as performance, impression management, micro-politics, weak and strong languages, and cultural difference.

Traditional interviewing techniques often fail to fully assess the “soft skills” required for a potential hire to succeed in a particular organizational culture. This case study presents an alternate framework for evaluating candidates to determine their ability to effectively collaborate with existing team members. The authors report the process used in hiring two faculty librarians in 2011 and the ways the process was revised to fill two newly created positions in 2013. A review of management literature on interview techniques supports using practical exercises and strategically designed questions to assess a candidate’s fit within a given organizational culture. The experiences reported in this case study bear that out. The process of strategically designing the interview structure enabled the department to gain a better vision of its priorities and values, while the interviews enabled the team to select additional members who work well in a collaborative environment with the personalities already in place. Readers can use this to redesign their interview procedures to more effectively select candidates who will contribute to the vision and positive culture of their workplace. This model was successful in this instance and readers can modify these procedures to adapt to their own workplace cultures in any type of library. Building on strategies used in various industries, this chapter translates the use of practical exercises and strategically designed questions into an academic library context.