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In order for an interview to be effective, it must be both valid and reliable. Validity is a matter of designing questions that assess skills that are job-related and essential to police offcer performance. Reliability is a matter of designing and deploying the interview in such a way that candidates can be accurately assessed. There are a number of ways in which the validity and reliability of interviews are routinely damaged. Following are the most common errors that affect an interview���s quality. The vast majority of these errors strip the interview of its reliability / accuracy. Certain errors, such as the frst two, also harm the validity of the interview. Lack of an Assessment Plan There are a number of skills that you could be trying to assess: interpersonal skill, confict resolution, customer service, decision making, prioritization, communication, etc. The goal of a good oral interview is to measure the skills that are most critical to the job. This requires that you frst identify the essential job skills you are trying to measure and then design your questions to measure these job skills. Too often questions are drafted without any consideration regarding what you aim to assess. Asking the Wrong Questions Once you know what you are trying to measure, the questions become the critical mechanism to get you there. Often, agencies are asking questions that fail to measure important skills. Questions such as ���Why do you want to be a police offcer?��� or ���What have you done to prepare for a career in the law enforcement feld?��� generally have little value. Ask yourself, would answers like, ���I am interested in a well-paid career with a good pension��� or ���I thought long and hard about being a police offcer and then flled out a job application��� be poor responses? The real question is, what are these types of questions telling you about the candidates��� job skills? In reality, they You have a lot of money invested in the recruit, as well as maximum liability exposure. Did you ask obvious questions during the interview? Did you use consensus scoring? Were your interviewers trained to interview job candidates? do not provide much reliable information. A good question will place the applicant in a complex and job-related scenario where the applicant���s response offers great insight into various skills. There are a handful of ���time-honored��� questions that many agencies ask that have relatively little value. Maybe more importantly, most candidates expect them and have found answers to these questions on the Internet. If you ���Google������ ���common police offcer interview questions,��� you will likely see a lot of the questions that you have used in the past or use currently. Questions such as, ���Why do you believe you will make a good police offcer?��� or ���What have you done to prepare for a career in law enforcement?��� are not the best questions for reliably measuring essential job skills and will often result in introducing unwanted error into the rating process. Asking Questions with Obvious Answers Interviewers often ask questions that have obvious answers. Considering the candidate is always attempting to provide what he / she believes is an intelligent answer, coupled with what he / she believes you are looking for, questions that have obvious answers simply produce socially desirable, less-thancandid responses. The ideal strategy is to use complex scenario-based questions that require the candidate to process details and present a complex response. The candidate will be challenged to come up with a reasonable response to the question and will have little mental energy to expend trying to fgure out what answer you are ���looking for.��� Too Few Questions, Too Little Time One of the strategies that is employed when there are high numbers of candidates to interview is to reduce the amount of time spent with each candidate by reducing the number of questions and the time allowed to ask and answer these questions. The fewer questions that are asked, the less information you receive and the fewer the job skills you can assess. A worthwhile interview will include fve to eight complex questions and allow for approximately 20 to 30 minutes of time with each candidate. If this cannot be accomplished, it may be worth considering alternatives to the interview. There are tools available to replace interviews when candidate numbers make interviews impractical. www.lawandordermag.com 43