My thoughts on our mock interviews

In class on Friday we were able to experience some excellent examples in regard to how interviews can be conducted and were able to see what methods worked and what strategies were used. The fact that different strategies and methods were used made the interviews even better overall. This is due to the fact that we were able to see how one could approach an interview in different ways. Not everything about them were perfect though as nothing is. So, in the post below I will elaborate on the two interviews further.

I was involved in the first interview with my fellow classmate Nick as interviewees and I think we did a good job. We were able to take strategy and apply it to our interview, which we initiated with a two interviewer dynamic that I thought would be effective in throwing off our suspect. Our group, including Victoria and Rubi, created a great least of questions that was intended to build up our conversation and create an avenue for our suspect to follow, so that we could get the answers we were looking for. We tried to break the ice in the beginning and introduced ourselves and asked our suspect if she had ever been interviewed before. We did this because we wanted to build a little bit of rapport with her, so that once we began to ask her the questions that were crucial to our investigation she would be able to trust us when answering. Following this, we asked the questions necessary for our investigation and built up our questioning so that when we preformed our secret strategy it would be useful. This strategy is one that was mentioned in one of the readings we have on our blog space and it refers to how investigators attempted to elicit answers they wanted during a interview and or interrogation. Once our above method came together I think we did a good job at getting our suspect to say the things we wanted and preform the interview the way we wanted to. A thing we could improve on is the fact that we need to be looking for the truth and not just a confession, which may have not occurred in our interview if it was real. So, I thought our performance was good for the above reasons.

Moving on, there was one more interview done following ours and it was done by Kayley. She interviewed her suspect by herself with the questions her group had prepared. I thought she did a great job at building rapport when she asked for her suspects name and how she became manager and so on. I also thought she did a good job at asking more and more aggressive and fact based questions as the interview went. She also did well at restating answers so that she is documenting what they are saying  and that they know she is hearing what they are saying. So, she does this for both herself and her suspect. I thought the only issue with her interview was that I felt that she was getting a little bit to aggressive and loud at times when asking her questions. I think this could hurt the rapport you have already established with your suspect that you are interviewing. All in all, I thought this interview was done very well.

Further, I think this experience will be helpful in my future job. I think this because it has allowed me to have the experience of conducting an interview and then allowed me to practice using strategies to help my interview be successful. I think this experience will help me be more educated in regards to what you should look for and then what you can do to make your interview successful. 

To conclude, this experience was great and I think that future classes should do these mock interviews because they were fun and something I found useful for my future professional life.