The secret to finding the best idea ever? First think about the absolute worst

Tim Harford in The FT

When he first heard the music, Brian Eno grabbed a copy of the single and ran to find David Bowie. “I’ve found the sound of the future,” he breathlessly announced. It was 1977, and the sound of the future was “I Feel Love”. Donna Summer’s ethereal vocals were backed by producer Giorgio Moroder’s pulsing, looping Moog synthesiser. 

Moroder offers a curious account of his inspiration. He says he went to see the film of the year, Star Wars, and took note of the scene in the Mos Eisley Cantina, a wretched hive of scum and villainy in which a band of strange alien musicians perform a jaunty tune. (One wonders: Star Wars was released after “I Feel Love”; but Moroder’s hazy memories are still instructive.) 

“I didn’t think it was the music of the future,” Moroder has recalled, which was true. (The aliens are playing woodwind, while the Star Wars composer John Williams was influenced by 1940s swing when he penned their tune.) If Moroder wanted to create the music of the future for Donna Summer, he needed to do the opposite of that. “I Feel Love” has no band and no conventional instruments except a kick drum. 

There is a lot more to “I Feel Love” than simply inverting John Williams’s pastiche of Benny Goodman, but the story illustrates the curious power of turning an idea on its head. If you want to produce the music of the future, ponder the music of the past, then do the opposite. 

Creativity gurus have termed this approach looking for the “worst possible idea”. When looking for a business breakthrough, a design innovation or a flash of artistic insight, it can be hard to think of much when challenged to dream up a good idea. Far easier, less intimidating and more fun to write down a list of terrible ideas, then see what those terrible ideas suggest once you turn them on their heads. 

Sometimes the worst-idea exercise is little more than a warm-up, getting the imaginative sparks flying before the real creative work begins. Sometimes, however, focusing on what makes an idea bad shines the spotlight on what might make an idea good. If the bad idea is to make a product look clumsy and ugly, that suggests it’s worth paying more attention to the product’s elegance and beauty. If the bad idea is to ship the product with bewildering instructions, the good idea is to hire an editor to hone the instructions. 

Even more intriguing is when the bad idea is actually a great idea. Imagine a “worst possible idea” brainstorm for a restaurant. What if the waiters in your restaurant were rude to the customers? Bad idea. Except that was the signature method of Wong Kei’s, located in London’s Chinatown, and the sheer drama of it made Wong Kei’s a popular destination for decades. 

What if customers weren’t given a choice and told they would just have to eat whatever the kitchen prepared? Nowadays, we call that the tasting menu and charge a premium for it. What if customers had to pay up front before they were even allowed on the premises? Come to think of it, that is how a theatre or a concert works, and it would mean that customers ended their evening with dessert rather than by trying to figure out how to split the bill. Sometimes the opposite of a good idea is another good idea. 

For another example, how might you flip the script on a job interview? The traditional interview is a gruelling experience, an inquisition in which the interviewers probe applicants for weakness under pressure. But you wouldn’t try that on a first date, so why exactly is it such a brilliant idea when seeking new colleagues? 

In his recent book, Hidden Potential, the psychologist Adam Grant outlines an alternative: what about a job interview where the aim was to make the candidate as comfortable as possible and to help them demonstrate strengths rather than reveal weaknesses? Grant describes the recruitment process of Call Yachol, a call centre based in Israel. Candidates are invited to bring a friend or a pet along to the interview and given the opportunity to display relevant skills in familiar contexts. 

Most strikingly, the interview is turned upside-down at the end. Candidates are asked to rate their interview experience. Were they made to feel welcome? Did they get an opportunity to show the best of their abilities? If not, would they like to come back another day and do it all again? What should the interviewers do differently when they do? 

Call Yachol bends over backwards because it is staffed entirely by people with disabilities, and it wants to make sure it doesn’t accidentally disadvantage a candidate who cannot see, cannot hear or is neurodiverse. But reading Grant’s description of the process made me wonder whether something closer to Call Yachol’s approach might work better for everyone. After all, nobody seems particularly delighted with how well the pressure-interrogation model of recruitment works. Why not try a different way of trying to find talented people? 

So let’s hear it for wilful contrarianism in the search for inspiration. Sometimes looking for a bad idea gets the creative juices flowing. Sometimes a bad idea perfectly highlights what would make an idea good. And sometimes, the bad idea is actually the best idea of all. What about a movie set in space that isn’t futuristic, but features wizards and sword fights? What if most of the technology looks like it emerged from the second world war, rugged, grimy, pragmatic, with few visible computers? And what if the aliens are playing something like Benny Goodman? “Space, but old-fashioned” turns out to be an inspired move. It’s why the aesthetic of Star Wars has stood the test of time almost as well as “I Feel Love”.

If chatbots can ace job interviews for us, maybe it’s time to scrap this ordeal

It’s always been an unreliable process, so let’s think again about how to recruit the right people writes Martha Gill in The Guardian 

In the evolutionary arms race between interviewer and interviewee, I think it is inevitable that both roles will at some point be played fully by robots. AI is already helping us to filter through CVs – one day, we will be able to leave chatbots entirely to it: everywhere, in pockets of cyberspace, one large language model will be offering another a seat and asking about the last challenge it faced at work, while we humans get on with something more useful.

We came one step closer to this utopia recently, when one – clearly quite brilliant – job candidate was revealed to be using AI to feed her answers during a Zoom interview. A phone app recorded the questions in real time and delivered “perfect” replies, which she calmly read off the screen, thus demonstrating innovation, resourcefulness, and a healthy disrespect for the whole interview process. I hope she gets the job.

This disrespect is, after all, long overdue. It may be time to get rid of the job interview altogether. Since at least the early 1900s, it has squatted in the centre of the hiring process, where it has revealed – primarily – that we like to think ourselves “good at reading people”, when in fact we really aren’t. We know this because the interview has been the subject of a swathe of research. And what has this research told us? In sum, that if one candidate outperforms another in an informal interview, the chances that they will do better in the job are little better than flipping a coin.

How do we get people so wrong? Well, one major problem is bias . How a candidate looks tends to matter more than it should – the beautiful always do better, even when the job involves data input or working for radio. People also tend to give jobs to those most similar to them in terms of background, gender, age and race (there are now attempts to train recruiters out of this, but biases are hard to shift). When recruiters aim to find someone who is a “cultural fit” for their workplace, this is often what they are doing, consciously or not.

People tend to give jobs to those most similar to them in terms of background, gender, age or race

Then, too, minds are often made up during the first few minutes of an interview, in the bit where you chat about the traffic or the weather, supposedly to get the candidate to relax. This suggests superficial qualities weigh heavily in hiring decisions, whether or not recruiters are aware of it. The firmness of a handshake can be used to predict offers, even when grip strength has little to do with the job itself. Apparently, this is in part because first impressions can dictate the direction of the rest of the interview. If recruiters feel apprehensive about a candidate at first glance, they might be inclined to ask them tougher questions, or look for evidence that their impressions are correct.

In his book Noise, psychologist Daniel Kahneman provides a telling example of this sort of bias. Two colleagues interview the same candidate, who explains that he left his last job because of a “strategic disagreement with the CEO”. But the colleagues interpret this differently. One, who starts with a positive view of the interviewee, takes it “as an indication of integrity and courage”. The other, who has formed the opposite impression, believes that instead it shows “inflexibility, perhaps even immaturity”.

This wouldn’t matter, perhaps, if interviews were treated as a relatively small part of the hiring process – the final flourish. But they tend to leave vivid impressions, which can override CVs, references, and even test scores. Yes – performance in one highly artificial situation seems to matter more than actual data.

Despite all this, employers are deeply attached to the process – they remain convinced that they cannot really “get a feel of a candidate” without it. Like driving or sex, we all seem to have a deeply held belief that we are good at interviewing. Structured interviews – where every candidate is asked the same question and evaluated according to an algorithm, rather than according to the guts of their interviewers – are better at predicting job performance but have been fiercely resisted by employers. They prefer to trust their intuition to tell them whether a candidate is right or not. They “just know”.

One answer, then, as to why the interview remains in the hiring process, is that it massages the egos of recruiters. I think that this might also explain another puzzle – a fad for off-the-wall questions that have nothing to do with the job.

Such questions have long infuriated job seekers. When in 1921 the American inventor Thomas Edison interviewed graduates at his plant, the questions included “Who wrote Home Sweet Home?” and “What is the weight of air in a room 20x30x10?”. “ ‘Victims’ of test say only ‘a walking encyclopedia’ could answer questionnaire” ran a headline in the New York Times. But, of course, the trend didn’t end there. “If you could be remembered for one sentence, what would it be?” Google once asked candidates for an associate account strategist position. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, had this question for prospective bankers: “If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?”

Of course, one effect of such questions is to make a profession seem far more interesting than it is – thus flattering the interviewers.

But hiring is too important for this sort of nonsense; a nation’s success, after all, rides on the quality of its employees. Getting the right people into the right jobs is where fairness and productivity meet. We should start by making job interviews more structured. We could end by getting rid of them altogether.

Robert Greene: The Art of Seduction

 

Arranged Jobs - Interviews and more interviews

 

We know life is a game of chance, so why not draw lots to see who gets the job?

Sonia Sodha in The Guardian

Remove human bias from the interview process and the world might start to become a fairer place 

 

Interviews are an unreliable way of selecting the best person for the job. Photograph: Alamy


The sweaty palms, the swotting, the tricky question that prompts your heart to plummet: job interviews are no one’s idea of a good time. The other side of the equation is hardly fun either: days out of a busy schedule spent interviewing candidates, some of whom you know within a couple of minutes you would never offer a job.

Interviews are time-consuming for all involved. But we persist in doing them because recruitment decisions are some of the most important we take in the workplace and it follows we should invest time and energy into a robust recruitment process, right?

Wrong. It is long established that unstructured interviews are a notoriously unreliable way of selecting the best people for the job. This is perhaps unsurprising, when you consider the limited overlap between the skills needed to ace an interview and perform well day to day in a job or on a university course. And how many of us can honestly say we have been 100% truthful in a job interview?

Experimental studies show how unreliable interviewers are at accurately predicting someone’s capabilities. This is borne out on the rare occasions it gets tested in the real world. In the late 1970s, there was a doctor shortage in Texas and politicians instructed the state medical school to increase its admissions, after it had already selected 150 applicants after interview. So it took another 50 candidates who had reached the interview stage and been rejected, even though many of the stronger rejected candidates had already been snapped up by other medical schools. Researchers found these 50 students performed just as well as the original crop. Once the candidates got through the on-paper sift, they might as well have been drawn out of a hat.

Not only are interviews a generally bad way to spot talent, they are terrible at smuggling in bias. There are the obvious implicit biases – sexism, racism, ageism, class discrimination – but others also exist. According to psychologist Ron Friedman, we tend to perceive good-looking people to be more competent, tall candidates as having greater leadership potential and deep-voiced candidates as more trustworthy. Interviews also encourage us to pick people who look like us, think similarly to us and with whom we strike up an easy rapport. The myth of the meritocratic interview allows all sorts of prejudice to flourish.

These days, huge effort goes into trying to unpick these biases in interviews. Vast sums are spent on unconscious bias training, but the evidence as to its effectiveness is mixed at best. It turns out training a person’s subconscious to think differently isn’t as easy as a half-day course.


An element of random selection might engender a bit more humility on the part of white, middle-class men

This is why it is no substitute for breaking down the structures that allow these biases to fester. For example, managers might only be allowed to make an appointment once they have a sufficiently diverse shortlist. I’ve long been a believer in quotas for underrepresented groups where improving diversity is happening at a glacial pace, for example, in Oxbridge admissions.

But a recent conversation with a friend who works at Nesta, a charitable foundation, got me thinking about whether we should ditch the pretence that we can accurately predict people’s potential. Her organisation is experimenting with a lottery to award funding to staff for innovative projects. Employees can put forward their own proposal. All of those that meet a minimum set of criteria go into a draw, with a number selected for funding at random.

My initial thought was that this sounded bonkers. But ponder it more and the logic is sound. Not only does it eliminate human bias, it encourages creativity and avoids groupthink, discouraging staff from self-censoring because they think their idea is one management simply wouldn’t go for. It chimes with those who have argued that at least some science funding should be awarded by lottery, because in the contemporary world of peer review and scoring grids, risky ideas with potentially huge pay-offs do not attract sufficient funding.

Random selection embodies a very different conception of fairness to meritocracy. But if we accept that what we call meritocracy is predominantly a way for advantage to self-replicate, why not at least experiment with lotteries instead? Big graduate recruiters or Oxbridge courses could set “on paper” entry criteria, select candidates who meet them at random and test whether there are any differences with candidates selected by interview.

I am willing to bet that, as observed in Texas, they would do no worse. And that there would be other benefits: diversity of thought as well as diversity of demography. Quotas are often criticised for their potential to undermine those individuals who benefit from positive discrimination; everyone knows they are there not purely on merit, or so the argument goes. An element of random selection might engender a bit more humility on the part of white, middle-class men; it goes alongside being honest that meritocracy is a convenient mask for privilege.

The reason such experiments remain unlikely is that studies show that even when people are aware of the fallibility of interviews, they sustain incredible self-belief in their ability to buck the trend. Not only that, there are a lot of powerful people with a stake in maintaining the illusion of meritocracy. Oxford and Cambridge want to preserve the misconception that their selection procedures embody the creme de la creme of today selecting the creme de la creme of tomorrow.

But if you find yourself balking at random selection, ask yourself this: have you ever formed a first impression that was wrong? It might go against the grain, but making more liberal use of lotteries might produce not just a fairer but a better and more diverse world.

Why job interviews are pointless

Richard Nisbett in The Guardian


 

Hard taskmaster: Ricky Gervais as David Brent in The Office. Photograph: Adrian Rogers/BBC



Statistics often sounds like a dry subject, but many judgments and decisions in everyday life would be improved by an application of statistical principles. Take the following scenario: a football scout hears of a player who has powered his team to a good win-loss record. His coaches think he’s one of the most talented players they’ve seen. But the scout is unimpressed by the one practice game he sees him in; he tells his manager it’s not worth trying to recruit the player. 

Most sports fans would think that was a pretty foolish call, right? Athletic performance is much too variable to base an important judgment on such a small sample. It’s not necessary to take a statistics course to get the correct answer to this problem.

But consider this problem: an employer gets an application from a junior executive with an excellent college record and strong references from his current employer. The employer interviews the applicant and is unimpressed. The employer tells his colleagues that it’s not worthwhile recruiting him.

Most people regard this as a reasonable sort of decision. But it isn’t. Countless studies show that the unstructured 30-minute interview is virtually worthless as a predictor of long-term performance by any criteria that have been examined. You have only slightly more chance of choosing the better of two employees after a half-hour interview as you would by flipping a coin.

In both of these cases, predictions based on references – school reports, prior performance, letters of recommendation – give a 65-75% chance of choosing the better of the two.

Why do we get the athletic problem right and the employment problem wrong? Because in the case of the job, unlike for athletic performance, we haven’t seen hundreds of candidates in interviews of a particular type and seen how well performance in the interview corresponds to ultimate performance in the setting we’re concerned about. We haven’t seen that the guy who looks like a dunce in the interview turns out to be a whiz on the job and the guy who aced the interview turns out to be a dud. The only way to see that the interview isn’t going to be worth much is to be able to apply the “law of large numbers”, which prompts the recognition that an interview represents a very small sample of behaviour, whereas the references summarise a lot of behaviour.

The bottom line: there’s safety in numbers. The more recommendations a person has, the more positive the outcome is likely to be for the employer. Consider the job interview: it’s not only a tiny sample, it’s not even a sample of job behaviour but of something else entirely. Extroverts in general do better in interviews than introverts, but for many if not most jobs, extroversion is not what we’re looking for. Psychological theory and data show that we are incapable of treating the interview data as little more than unreliable gossip. It’s just too compelling that we’ve learned a lot from those 30 minutes.

My recommendation is not to interview at all unless you’re going to develop an interview protocol, with the help of a professional, which is based on careful analysis of what you are looking for in a job candidate. And then ask exactly the same questions of every candidate. It’s harder to develop such a protocol than you might guess. But it can really pay off.

You're more biased than you think – even when you know you're biased

Nobody’s political opinions are just the pure, objective, unvarnished truth. Except yours, obviously

‘Even when people acknowledge that what they’re about to do is biased, they still are inclined to see their resulting decisions as objective.’ Photo: Spencer Platt /Getty

When it comes to the important issues, I’m pretty sure my opinions are just right. Of course I am: if I thought they were wrong, I’d trade them in for some different ones. But in reality, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that we’re all at least somewhat subject to bias – that my support for stricter gun control laws here in the US, for example, is partly based on wanting to support my team. Tell Republicans that some imaginary policy is a Republican one, as the psychologist Geoffrey Cohen did in 2003, and they’re much more likely to support it, even if it runs counter to Republican values. But ask them why they support it, and they’ll deny that party affiliation played a role. (Cohen found something similar for Democrats. Maybe I mentioned Republicans more prominently because I’m biased?)

Surely, though, if you tell people you’re giving them biased information – if you specifically draw their attention to the risk of being led astray by bias – they’ll begin to question their own objectivity? Nope: even then, they’ll insist they’re reaching an unbiased conclusion, if a new paper by five Princeton researchers (which I found via Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard) is anything to go by. 

Emily Pronin and her colleagues asked Princeton students, and other people recruited online, to look at 80 paintings, and to give each a score from 1 to 10 based on their artistic merit. Half of the subjects weren’t told the artists’ identities. The other half were allowed to see a name, purportedly that of the painter of each picture. In fact, those names were a mixture of famous artists and names pulled from the phone book. As you’d predict, those who saw the names were biased in favour of famous artists. But even though they acknowledged the risk of bias, when asked to assess their own objectivity, they didn’t view their judgments as any more biased as a result. 

Even when the risk of bias was explicitly pointed out to them, people remained confident that they weren’t susceptible to it; indeed, they actually rated their performance as more objective than they’d predicted it would be at the start of the test. “Even when people acknowledge that what they are about to do is biased,” the researchers write, “they still are inclined to see their resulting decisions as objective.”

This is more evidence for the “bias blind spot”, a term coined by Pronin which refers to the head-spinning fact that we have a cognitive bias to the effect that we’re uniquely immune to cognitive biases. Take the famous better-than-average effect, or Lake Wobegon effect, whereby the majority of people think they’re above average on any number of measures – their driving skills, their popularity, the quality of their relationship – when clearly they can’t all be right. It turns out the bias also applies to bias. In other words, we’re convinced that we’re better than most at not falling victim to bias. We seem to imagine we’re transparent to ourselves: that when we turn our attention within, we can clearly see all the factors influencing our decisions. The study participants “used a strategy that they thought was biased,” the researchers note, “and thus they probably expected to feel some bias when using it. The absence of that feeling may have made them more confident in their objectivity.”

This helps explain, for example, why it’s often better for companies to hire people, or colleges to admit students, using objective checklists, rather than interviews that rely on gut feelings. As Jacobs notes, it’s also why some orchestras ask musicians to audition from behind screens, so that only their music can be judged. It’s no good relying on the judges’ sincere confidence that they’d never let sexism or other biases get in the way. They may really believe it – but they’re probably wrong. Bias spares nobody. Except me, of course.

Reclaim the BBC – starting with the Today programme

The Today programme's old boys' club style reveals just how out of touch the BBC is with its licence-fee payers

• Elinor Davies for our Beeb, part of the Guardian Comment Network
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 June 2012 11.39 BST

'Despite its veneer of neutrality [Radio 4's] Today programme gives us a very specific take on the world.' Photograph: Graeme Robertson

1. ourBeeb is a new website hosted by openDemocracy's OurKingdom section, which will debate the future of the UK's most important cultural institution

Like many people, I tune into the Today programme most weekday mornings before I go to work. It's a form of masochism, really, as I don't enjoy it much and I know full well I will end up swearing at the radio. But it covers the main stories of the day and makes me feel vaguely plugged into what's going on in the world. So why the expletives?

Despite its veneer of neutrality (a problematic concept anyway, of course) the Today programme gives us a very specific take on the world. It's a world in which the views of the establishment are unquestionable facts, and a needlessly aggressive interview style masquerades as incisive journalistic scrutiny.

In the programme's daily review of the newspapers the entrenched prejudices of the mainstream media regularly go unchallenged. The presenters read out quotes from a selection of the daily rags on a range of the day's stories. But who decides which papers, which quotes, which stories? Last Tuesday they covered the revelation by the Department for Work and Pensions that thousands of people on sickness benefit "had been discovered to be fit for work". This is a complicated news story – who decided they were fit for work? According to what measures? But not for Today. We get the illusion of bias-free reporting – they're only reading out what the papers say, after all. But what the presenters gave us were two very similar angles on the story, from the Daily Mail and the Sun, both of which unquestioningly used these statistics to bolster the editorial line that these scroungers should get back to work. Why quote from two papers with the exact same viewpoint?

Often, in an effort to provide two sides of a debate there is that familiar, pointlessly adversarial interview style that the Today programme specialises in. Last June, the writer Graham Linehan wrote this searing critique of the "squabbling that passes for debate" on Today. Linehan was writing after his experience on the programme, in which he had been invited on to discuss his stage adaptation of The Ladykillers, only to discover he was expected to provide one side in an "argument" about the value of adapting films for theatre. Of course, as Linehan admits, confrontational interviews sometimes make sense – we need them sometimes to get to the truth. But more often it is not the best way to get to the heart of a story. Such interviews have the air of a university debating society, where notions are challenged and argued merely for the fun of it. (They remind me a little too much of Chris Morris interviewing the organiser of the London Jam Festival on The Day Today.)

Paradoxically, when the Today presenters are confronted with the genuinely powerful, the interviews can be surprisingly lightweight, a case in point being John Humphrys' recent interview with David Cameron. Humphrys spent a tiresome five or so minutes haranguing him about Abu Qatada (and admittedly gave him a bit of a hard time about tax dodgers in government), but failed to challenge any of the Tory tropes that Cameron trotted out repeatedly throughout the interview, about being on the side of "hardworking people who do the right thing", making the country more "pro get up and go" and even "making sure our children aren't burdened with debt". Is it not Humphrys' job to pick apart such cliches and enquire what they actually mean? The interview descended into an infuriating kind of mateyness, in which the two men laughingly discussed Cameron's relaxed demeanour and his "date nights" with his wife. As if this wasn't nauseating enough, when the interview finished, the BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, (known for his long-standing Tory associations) joined Humphrys for a nice cosy chat about the PM and the interview that had just finished. There was no mention, in either conversation, of NHS reform, of unemployment, or of the double-dip recession. It was all just one big jolly jape.

It is this lofty, old boys' club approach to the news – as if nothing really matters beyond the Today studios – that I find so irksome. There was a discussion on the programme a few weeks ago about the effect of the housing benefit cap on low-paid Londoners, between Grainia Long from the Chartered Institute of Housing and Mark Easton, the BBC's home editor. Both Long and Easton quoted statistics demonstrating rising rents and the massive financial pressure the cap places on people in the capital. But the discussion quickly became focused on the effect the cap would have on the flow of cheap labour into London. Easton speculated whether the government had really thought through the impact of this policy and wondered aloud just who was going to do these low-paid jobs in London if people couldn't afford to pay the rent.

It's a valid point of course, but Easton's observation did have a touch of the Today loftiness about it. Running through it seemed to be the assumption that listeners really only care about this issue because it means that there will be no poor people left to sweep the streets or serve coffees or empty the bins in their offices. The low-paid workers are not the participants in this discussion – they are merely objects, being talked about in so far as they are useful. Today does not belong to these people.

As Dave Boyle points out in his article for ourBeeb, the BBC is astonishingly unaccountable to its licence-payers and boy does it show. For me, nothing expresses the need to reclaim the BBC better than those smug exchanges between rich, powerful men on Today. We deserve better than this.

You are a Brand

Are you a Coke or a Pepsi?
Presenting yourself as a 'brand' may help you secure a job interview.

Remember the Pepsi Challenge? Take a group of punters, two cans of cola, cover up the labels, and get them to taste. Pepsi always wins; more people like the taste of Pepsi than Coke.

But walk into a supermarket and something weird happens. Coke outsells Pepsi. For quite a lot of us, the rational bit of our brain, which tells us Pepsi is nicer, gets overridden. An irrational, emotional bit, the bit that likes the sexy shape of the old Coke bottle, or that would like to teach the world to sing, takes control, and we buy Coke.

That’s the power of a brand, and people have them just like companies. And recruiting someone is like walking down that supermarket aisle. Loads of people apply, with roughly the same experience, skills and qualifications. Rationally, there’s not much to choose between them – candidates are a hundred cans of cola on a shelf. So how do employers pick who to interview?

They pick irrationally. Emotionally. On the basis of what they pick up about your personal brand. And most of that will come from the way you write your CV and cover letter. Not just getting your apostrophes in the right place (though that’s a good start), but your 'tone of voice’.

So for any decent job, an identikit CV means death. Start with 'I am a hard-working team player ...’ and, even if it’s true, you’ll sink back into the vat of candidate cola that’s slopping around. And avoid buzzwords. If you trained a load of people, say that; don’t say you 'upskilled a functional unit of direct reports’.

If I’m the employer, wading through them, I want someone who makes me take notice. Who sounds funny. Or brave. Or good company. Or caring. Someone who takes the risk of standing out from the crowd. If your hobby is the conservation of rare toads, drop that in. If you think the way your industry works is completely unsustainable, say so. Anything that will intrigue your reader into conversation will pay dividends. Because the aim of most job applications isn’t to get you a job, it’s to get an interview. Once you’re in the room you can show what a hard-working team player you are. By then you’ve got me hooked.

That’s why, for many big brands and smaller companies, how you reply to a job advert is the first filter.

They might have spent thousands on a recruitment campaign.

So if you don’t pick up on the tone of that ad, and send a generic CV, like most people do, it says you probably won’t pick up on the culture if you end up working there. It says you’re the wrong person.

You must put a bit more of yourself into your writing. Decide if you want to sound like a Coke, or a supermarket’s own brand.

If it’s the right place, and the right job for you, it will work.

And then you won’t kick yourself for being like Pepsi – competent, but unloved.

Neil Taylor is creative director of brand language consultancy The Writer (thewriter.com) and author of Brilliant Business Writing.

Oxbridge interview: top twenty tips for surviving - by graduates and tutors

 

 

Oxbridge interviews are shrouded in mystery and dogged by myth so let us guide you through the process with the help of people who've been on both sides of the interview

Compiled by Joanna Sugden

Before the interview
1. Don't forget an alarm clock
It sounds mundane but could be make or break if you have an early interview and stay over in college the night before. Pack an alarm clock or a mobile phone that is charged so that you don't have a restless night's sleep worrying whether you'll miss it.
2. Brush up on your personal statement
Make sure you've done everything you put down in your personal statement. If you have time, quickly skim-read some of the texts you've mentioned so that you'll be able to quote in your interview or at least know what they're talking about. "I hadn't read one of the books on my personal statement so I got my dad to give me a quick summary before the interview. I got in there and they asked me about one of the characters and I had no idea who it was. It was so embarrassing," says one graduate who read French and Spanish at Oxford.
3. Know what your interviewer has written
Rosemary Bennett, who read Politics, Philosophy and Economics says doing your homework on the subject tutors at the college will make you stand out. "Be really prepared and read what they have written recently. It's so easy to find out what they have done – not so that you can suck up to them - but so you know their areas of interest. If you know their take on a situation you won't go in with half baked opinions to the expert."
4. Make an effort with your appearance
"Wear something bright to make yourself more memorable. Try to look smart but not too try-hard," says one Cambridge Theology graduate.
Murad Ahmed, who studied Law at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge advises, "You just have to look like you've made an effort and take the interview seriously. That might mean a suit and tie, or just dressing smartly. The guy after me came dressed in a Gap hoody, and I never saw him again."
5. Keep an eye on the notice board
Your interview time will be posted on the college notice board in the college entrance and in the Junior Common Room. The times of these can change at the last minute and if you are required for another interview the only way of finding out is to check the board. Some colleges will take your mobile number and ring you to let you know of any changes - but it's best to check it every couple of hours just in case.
6. Don't be put off by other candidates
"Don't be too intimidated by everyone else and what they know – it is your interview and you will be the only one in the room – not them – so be confident in your own abilities," says Laura O'Connor who got into Jesus College Oxford to study Geography.
In the interview
7. Choose where to sit with care
The interviews are usually held in the tutor's office and you will often have a choice of seats ranging from a plastic chair to a college heirloom which had seen better days when Henry VIII made a visit.
Kate Rushworth, who read English and German at Oxford says "I remember sitting on the sofa as instructed and it being so old and flat that I ended up practically sitting on the floor with my knees around my ears."
Your choice of seat isn't a test but it's better not to be distracted by it. So pick a seat that looks half stable and try not to sit in such a way that your leg goes to sleep and you have to limp out of the room when you leave.
8. Make eye-contact
Murad Ahmed, now a journalist says: "It's a confidence thing. If you've got an interview, you've got the grades to be there." He says tutors he's spoken to are looking for something more than grades. "I took that to mean, that somehow we could 'add' to the institution. I think quiet confidence is what you want to try to evoke, and making eye contact is key."
9. Don't be intimidated by the tutors
"But be aware that they know everything you know - and a hell of a lot more," says Rhiannon Evans, who studied Politics Philosophy and Economics at Oxford and is now studying for a PhD. "They are trying to explore your thought processes. Therefore make it obvious. Don't just jump it with your final answer as this suggests a lack of reflexivity. You're not on Family Fortunes. Fully articulate your evaluation and argument."
10. Don't speak too soon
Being enigmatic and thoughtful can count in your favour, says Nico Hines who studied history at Cambridge. "When they ask you a question, even if you can think of a decent response straight away - just keep your mouth shut for a few seconds and then answer, it makes you appear more contemplative and considered."
11. But do say something memorable
Rosemary Bennett says: "Get something in that is memorable because they see so many people. Say something that's going to stick in their mind. The most wacky thing you have done, they are looking for rounded people, not just people who are studying relentlessly for A-Levels. Have something to say that isn't studying – something not to do with school work because they are looking for someone with wider interest. Something that shows you're not a cookie cutter exam person."
12. Answer the question but ask if you don't understand it
Dr Rhodri Lewis an English tutor at Oxford University says: "Do answer the questions you're asked directly and with any pertinent examples you have to hand; stick rigorously to the point. Don't bluster and attempt to download pre-fabricated answers onto questions that don't warrant them. Do ask if you don't understand the question rather than attempt to answer questions that you don't understand."
13. Show off your broader knowledge
Dr Lewis advises: "Do show evidence of having read and thought broadly around your subject, moving well beyond the A-level syllabus. Do show an interest and awareness in the Oxbridge course you're proposing to read.
Don't, if asked about the fifth act of Othello, say that you haven't got round to that part of the play in class yet. Don't make it look like you're desperate to get into Oxbridge come what may, and that you've no great interest in your proposed subject of study.
14. But don't show off
Dr Lewis warns: "Don't try to be wisecracking smart-Alec; You may well be as clever as you think you are, but your interviewers are often pretty intelligent too, and become rapidly bored with this sort of showboating."
15. Don't panic
"Keep thinking, even when you find yourself in the stickiest of corners; interviewers want to find out how your mind works, not to trick, humiliate or otherwise expose you," says Dr Lewis.
16. Be prepared to change your mind
The way you think and whether you can think on your feet is much more important than coming up with the definitive answer – which in most cases doesn't exist.
"I was asked to review a passage from Othello, and went straight in, guns blazing, about the clever punctuation and the impressive effect it had only to be told that it wasn't actually Shakespeare's original punctuation. 'Aha! Look - here is a copy of the original Folio and the punctuation is different you see! What else did you think?' I was deflated and terrified having never even heard of the 'folio'", says one student – who did get a place.
After the interview
17. Don't worry about what other people say
Try to avoid conversations with other candidates about what happened in their interview. No two experiences will be the same and you'll just end up worrying that they did or didn't ask you something.
18. Be prepared for more
The Oxbridge entrance system means that you could be called for an interview at another college. This is nothing to worry about and isn't necessarily a sign you haven't got in to your college of choice.
The tutor may want a second opinion or think you are a bright candidate but just doesn't have space for you. Likewise if you don't get another interview it doesn't necessarily mean you have fallen at the last hurdle – they may have just decided you are strong enough to get straight in.
Laura O'Connor says: "Don't worry if they keep you on for an extra day – I sat nervously as they dismissed people at the end of the Tuesday, stayed overnight and huddled into the Geography faculty on the Wednesday to sit on a sofa by a fire all day, and in the end I wasn't called for any extra interviews," but she did get a place.
19. Congratulate yourself on having got through it
Getting through an Oxbridge interview with all your faculties still in tact is a reason to be proud. So don't berate yourself by replaying what you said or didn't say, just enjoy the fact that it's over.
20. Don't set all your hopes on getting in
Finally, don't get too worked up about it and don't place all your hopes for future happiness on a place at Oxbridge.
Wherever you go to university you will have three unique years in a place you are likely to count among the best in the world.

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Oxbridge walls that can't be scaled

 

Johann Hari

A blunt, blind admissions system still discriminates in favour of wealthy interview-machines

Thursday, 4 September 2008

Nothing causes a louder shriek in Britain than if you challenge the right of the rich to pass their privilege untouched on to their children. The shadow chancellor George Osborne has just decreed that the richest 1 per cent will – under David Cameron – be allowed to inherit £2 million estates they have done nothing to earn without paying a penny of it towards schools and hospitals. The "horror" of inheritance tax – introduced in the great progressive wave of the Edwardian era – will be over. This has been greeted with a gurgle of pleasure by Conservatives; why should anyone get in the way of wealth "cascading down the generations", as a Tory Prime Minister once put it?

Over the next few months, an even more tender spot for the privileged will be pressed: Oxford and Cambridge admissions. Today, a third of all Oxbridge students come from just 100 top schools. For example, half of the entire intake of £20,000-a-year Westminster School go there every year: some 410 pupils. The wealthy now have a taken-for-granted expectation that their kids will go to the best universities.

Some on the right, like the late Bill Deedes, explained this by saying the wealthy are a genetic over-class who naturally have cleverer children. But there's a hole in the side of this theory: several studies have shown that when rich people adopt kids from poor backgrounds, those children go on to do just as well.

To see how this buying of unearned privilege works, I have to introduce you to two people I know who applied to study Philosophy at the same Cambridge college as me in 1998. The first is a likeable, confident guy whose parents are wealthy businesspeople. Let's call him Andrew. They sent him to one of the most expensive private schools in Britain, and he had never been in a class larger than 12. He was trained for over a year for his Cambridge interview – a near-scientific drill that included one-on-one tuition by Oxbridge graduates, extensive rewriting of his application form "with" a teacher, and even being videoed so his body language could be analysed.

The other person, by contrast, was a chain-smoking teenager brought up on an Enfield estate by her dinner-lady mum. Laura wrote her application alone, and she had no preparation for her interview at all. None. Most of her A-level classes had 25 people in them, and were led by teachers who hadn't even got top grades themselves. Andrew got four As. Laura got an A and three Bs.

Who had demonstrated they were smarter? I'd say Laura did – but she was rejected, while Andrew got in. His training – and a lifetime in such surroundings – paid off. Laura was nervous, and her complex thoughts about Nietzsche and Hume and Russell must have appeared less polished. It was Cambridge's loss: the cleverer student got away. This isn't a stray anecdote. For too long, it was the main story. In 2006, for example, the gap between the best private schools and the best grammar schools in exam results was just 1 per cent – but the private schools students were still twice as likely to be admitted.

Here's where we get to the pressure-point. For the past few years, senior figures in Oxford and Cambridge – pressured by a Labour government – have resolved this can't go on. They want to run a university for the best, not a highbrow finishing school. So they have begun to introduce very mild reformist measures. Instead of just looking at the surface of exam and interview performance, they will judge them in the context of the student's life. They'll look at your school's average exam grades, whether your parents went to university, and the area you're from: if you got good grades at a school in Moss Side, you'll be rated higher. This is painted by huffing headmasters at private schools as "positive discrimination". But the choice is not between a system that discriminates and one that doesn't. It's between a blunt, blind admissions system that discriminates in favour of wealthy well-trained interview-machines, and a sophisticated, seeing one that snuffles out the genuinely clever.
Soon the green shoots of these new policies will become clear. Geoff Parks, Cambridge's Director of Admissions, says early indicators show there will be a "significant" increase in pupils from normal backgrounds this year. Expect a firestorm of anger. The right-wing press will rage that "middle-class" children are being "persecuted". Their definition of "middle-class" is increasingly comic: the median wage in Britain is £24,000. Half of us earn more; half of us earn less. Yet they describe as "Middle England" people who spend that entire sum every year on one child's schooling.

Often, the privileged will defend their place merely with a visceral howl of "It's mine!" For example, David Cameron's relative Harry Mount has written an angry article asking, "What's wrong with keeping Oxford within the family?" He admits his success at his interview was "staggeringly unfair" but went on to say the only problem is rich people can't buy preference for their children outright with "donations."

There will be furious predictions that Oxbridge will collapse under a "chav-alanche" of inferior students. Those of us who believe that in Britain you should be able to get to the top if you are smart need to push back hard for these changes to be stepped up. Of course Oxbridge can't get us all the way to genuine meritocracy. For that, the schools system needs to be reworked to be genuinely comprehensive, rather than the parody we have today where they are split between good schools selecting by house-price and sink schools for the rest. But even with the unequal products of that system, Oxbridge can go a lot further.

In the 1970s, when the former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was Chancellor of Oxford University, he was amazed by the changes in the admissions process. "In my day," he said, "all they asked you was where you got your boots made." In the 2040s, we will be equally astonished that Oxbridge used to rely so heavily on interviews that give an unfair advantage to the well-drilled children of the wealthy.

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