Interviewing

Part of class lecture for a nursing management class covers the topic of interviewing. The book does a good job of listing questions students my get during their interviews. However to better prepare the students for this process we have implemented a couple of interactive strategies to better prepare the students for six questions they may be asked.

First in their management class students are broken down into small groups and asked to answer a question and report back to the class how they would answer the question. Along with this they need to give different strategies on how to answer the question and what to avoid while answering the question.

The questions they respond to are:

1. Tell me about yourself.
2. What are some of your weaknesses and what is your plan to improve in these areas.
3. Share with me what some of your strengths are and how they will impact your performance.

A follow-up to this is in the last clinical students need to complete and develop a portfolio. In the portfolio there are three topics students need to journal on. The topics are:

1. Tell me about a conflict situation you were involved in at work or clinical, how you resolved the conflict and what you learned from the experience.
2. Tell me about a patient experience where you had a positive impact on the patient experience (quality of care).
3. Tell me about a critical incident where you had to intervene that had a positive impact on a patient outcome (patient safety).

This gives the student actual practice preparing for an interview and developing answers to some difficult questions.

Jeff Matzke