When Interview Tasks Test the Wrong Thing
Right at the end of last term, I spoke to the interviewees who had attended an SBM interview for a secondary school I was working with. Every one of them, all experienced SBMs, came away thinking they'd ruined their chances, because of the task that was set.
After the event, I found out that the task had been set by a finance governor, a qualified accountant. Piecing the feedback together, it was a genuinely complicated piece of technical accounting, the kind of thing you'd expect from an accountancy exam, not necessarily from someone running the finance function of a school day to day.
There's crossover, of course, and no harm in testing some technical grounding. That said, when a task is built around what the assessor knows best rather than what the day to day needs of the role actually are, it risks testing the wrong thing.
The result isn't then the clearer picture of the candidates. It's a spotlight aimed at the wrong part of the job, one that made genuinely strong SBMs look weaker than they were, for a gap that was never really there.
As we head into the new academic year, it really is worth looking at exactly what you're testing for and whether it's actually the part of the role that matters most day to day.
