The Police regard interviewing as the single most important tool in their arsenal and this is also true for employers whether it be in their assessment of employees where they are investigating misconduct or the job interview scenario.
Research has shown that there are three stages of memory: encoding (put things into the memory); storage (maintain in the memory) retrieval (the recovery of the memory).
Memory can fail at any one of these stages and is susceptible to different factors. For example when encoding, things can be forgotten because they are seen as unimportant at the time, they can be affected by the interaction between the person and the event and they can be affected by the physical state or stress of the person.
Memory can be affected in its storage if information lacks relevance/context and therefore is “forgotten”; there can be too much information to store; and the most common of all, it is simply forgotten.
There are also factors affecting retrieval. Some of these are when the language used influences the recall of the memory. The example used was when the words “smash” and “hit” were used when asking people to recall a slide show about a motor vehicle accident. When the word “smash” was used 32% of people recalled broken glass, when the word “hit” was used 16% of people recalled broken glass. In actual fact, in the slide show, there was no glass broken at all.
Stereotyping also influences recall. This is where prior experience or knowledge is influential. When asked to recall a person who had blond hair, fair complexion and green eyes, 50% of the 93% who recalled the blond hair recalled that the eyes were blue.
When conducting an interview both the quality and quantity of recall decreases as the questioning becomes more specific. Free recall shows the best recall, followed by the traditional open ended questions of “what, when, where, who, why, how ?” and finally leading questions produce the least in terms of both quality and quantity of recall.
The question for employers is how do you get the best “free recall”? The Police believe they have the answer in a technique called TEDS which stands for:
Tell Me
Explain to me
Describe for me
Show me.
These open ended questions allow people to tell a story with all of the facts to be linked together by context. It allows for a better quality of recall with a wider range of facts.
Interviewing is becoming an even more critical skill for employers and their advisers because of the rise in the numbers of matters that need investigating. Employers now need to investigate accidents which involve their staff and incidents of matters such as bullying.
The financial impact of getting the facts right so that correct decisions can be made has never been so important. The fines involved in a workplace accident have never been higher and the compensation available to employees who have been bullied is constantly growing.
I hope you find the above as useful as I have in the fine honing of your interview techniques.
