Some interviewing issues: Part two

Most applicants take the selection interview seriously and those applicants who have not attended an interview for several years and who do not in the course of their work have to establish new relationships with people, often approach the interview with a little uneasiness, if not undue fear. In order to bring out the best of a nervous and taciturn applicant the interviewer can probably learn something from the strategy of the constructor of aptitude tests. It is customary in the devising of a test to begin with a few questions which all the testees should be able to answer and thereafter to increase the order of difficulty of the test items with the really tricky questions at the end. It would be considered unfair of the test constructor to insert a particularly hard question into the early part of the test, since it might confound the testee who may well have been able to do it if he had been allowed to work up to it gradually.