An interview with death: careers services delivered differently

Graduates are expected to be innovative, adaptable and enterprising when they enter the labour market - why shouldn't careers services display the same traits?

In the summer of 2017 I met my colleague from Leeds University Business School (LUBS), Marianne Savory, to discuss running a workshop for her postgraduate Human Resource Management (HRM) students.

Marianne's objective was to run a session with another faculty on campus, where the majority of the students were from the UK. Most of her cohort was Chinese and she wanted them to mix more with English-speaking students to help improve their communication skills.

My objective was to run a careers and employability workshop in a more innovative and creative way.

The 'murder mystery' interview workshop

We decided to run an interview skills workshop based on a murder mystery whodunit. We identified the School of Performance and Cultural Industries (PCI) as the 'other' faculty to work with as (a) they would be able to provide 'home' students for Marianne's Chinese students to mix with, and (b) they could provide trainee actors for the activity, as well as a sound and lighting engineer.

The idea behind 'An Interview with Death' was:

1. Five candidates would be interviewed for the (real) role of management assistant for a leading comedy talent/TV production agency. PCI students would play the candidates.
2. Each candidate's character and responses to set interview questions would be based on a certain stereotype - i.e. a sports 'jock', a vlogger, a 'wannabe' famous celebrity, etc.
3. Each candidate would be interviewed in turn by Marianne and myself in front of the watching audience of HRM/PCI students. They would be asked two set questions each: not all the questions were the same, but they were based on the person specification for the job role.
4. Each student would work on their personality and answers to the questions they would be asked based on initial instructions from Marianne and myself.
5. At the end of the interviews, Marianne and I would pretend to confer about the successful candidate. I would go to inform one of the candidates that they were successful. I mimed talking to the group of candidates in front of the audience. Lights down, gunshot, screams, me on the floor 'dead'. Over to Marianne…
6. The audience, in groups, were then allowed to ask one further typical interview question each to whichever candidate they wished. Then they conferred and selected who had successfully secured the job and, by process of elimination, who had shot me.

Debate and discussion

What followed was an excellent conversation among the student audience and actors about interviews. This included the following topics:

• Unconscious bias - the successful candidate was the vlogger who had green hair. We talked about how the job role we sourced would not discriminate on the colour of the candidate's hair, whereas some of the audience did. This generated further conversation.
• Evidencing answers - a lot of my work as a careers consultant is to get students to understand why activities they feel are irrelevant to an employer/role are incredibly relevant due to the transferable skills they offer. This was especially the case with students from other cultures in this activity.
• Body language - we deliberately had the 'jock' character highlight aggressive body language, while one or two other candidates were cocky in how they articulated answers. The discussion revolved around confident versus cocky in terms of body language and verbal tone.
• Interviews in general - the actors were used to attending auditions, but had not been made aware of this type of interview, or had thought about alternative careers in the sector. This was enlightening for them (as well as the watching audience).

What next?

This was a pilot event. While we did not recruit as many audience members as we would have liked, the feedback was incredible. Below are a couple of quotes (verbatim) from audience members:

• 'Marc, thank you for facilitating an excellent session. A very different and accessible approach to learning about interview skills that was engaging and well executed. I think all students would benefit from this kind of careers skills development.'
• '…working with international students from different programmes can contribute diverse ideas to the job or task.'
• 'Really great acting, concept, facilitation and set up.'

Marianne and I have already spoken to PCI and will be running this activity again in 2019. I was also approached by some colleagues in other careers services at the AGCAS conference in Exeter, where I delivered a workshop about this activity, who would like to run something similar in their institutions.

It is ironic that in an age where technology is changing the careers landscape rapidly, a murder mystery whodunit could have such a great impact on millennial students. However, the key to this activity was delivering messages about the basic skills and information required to succeed at interviews in an informative and entertaining way.

If the world of work is changing, and candidates need to be more innovative and adaptable, shouldn't we as practitioners and careers services do the same?

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of HECSU/Prospects