This is a question often asked by candidates who attend our consultant interview courses, and to which there is no simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. The answer is ‘it depends’ and here is why.
Technically speaking, the NHS wants to appear to recruit candidates in a fair way in order to ensure that they make a decision based on the full knowledge of what the candidates have to offer (you neer know – an external candidate may be far better than the current internal candidate). As such the system will always be made to appear fair, even if in practice, it is not always the case.
The decision making system can operate in two ways:
- A voting system, whereby all panel members have a vote, with the candidate collecting the most votes being given the job;
- A points system whereby all candidates are marked separately, the points added up, with the candidate collecting the most points being given the job.
Whilst it is true without a doubt that some trusts apply the system in the fairest possible way (we have seen examples of preferred candidates losing out by as little as 0.5 points), both decision-making systems are opened to abuse. For example:
- The regulations state that the panel must contain a majority of clinicians. As such, it can be easy for those clinicians to agree to vote for a particular candidate. This however makes the assumption that the preferred candidate performs roughly as well as the others, otherwise the panel will struggle to justify voting for someone who is clearly a poor performer at interview. That is also why “preferred” candidates should not be too complacent and should ensure that they can put on a good performance on the day.
- The points system, on the surface, seems a lot fairer, but can also be easily manipulated. For a start, when do you mark? After each candidate? Or at the end once you have seen all the candidates. Marking after each candidate could be seen as unfair towards those who were interviewed first as experience suggests that those first in line tend to be marked more harshly due to the absence of a benchmark. Marking at the end (a widespread practice) can lead to manipulation of the results as interviewers simply have to make sure their favoured candidate is given a greater score. Such manipulation of the marks is made easier by the fact that the criteria used to select candidates are very loose. For example “Has demonstrated appropriate communication skills” is a very subjective criterion whicch could easily lead to a 0/10 or a 10/10 depending on whether your face fits or not.
There is a debate to be had about whether interviews should actually be fair or not. If you place yourself in the interviewers’ shoes you will rapidly see that in many cases it can be safer to opt for the guy you know, even if he has weaknesses, than for someone new whose weaknesses are an unknown quantity. It is often argued that internal candidates are at an advantage, and they certainly are since (i) they have a better idea of the department’s needs and are therefore better able to push the right buttons at the interview and (ii) they are a known quantity. But, external candidates also have a major advantage: they can bullshit their way to the job a lot better than an internal candidate ever could, precisely because they are unknown to the panel and because most of what they say is unverifiable.
Added to all this is the fact that, even if a panel is intent on being totally fair, subonsciously interviewers have a tendency to mark internal cnadidates slightly higher anyway. In addition, still subconsciously, most people’s unwritten agenda is that the local candidate will get the job unless someone else can demonstrate that they are substantially better or add much more value.
All that being said, there are clear examples of situations where some recruitment processes or interviews are being fixed or heavily influenced. These would include:
- Publishing job adverts in the wrong section of a paper (so that only the chosen candidate knows where to find it).
- Writing job descriptions which contain criteria that very few people would meet (such as publications on specific topics).
- Telling people at pre-shortlisting or pre-interview visits that there is a favourite candidate and that therefore they should not bother applying.
- Asking questions/presentation topics which require so much local knowledge that only an internal candidate would be in a position to answer them.
- Deliberately shortlisting weak candidates to stand against the preferred candidate.
- Refusing to see candidates for pre-interview visits, meaning that only the local candidate would be able to gather crucial information.
Although common practice, those behaviours do not affect the majority of cases and it is fair to say that most interviews are actually fully opened to competition, as the frequent failure of local candidates indicates. Indeed, local candidates run the risk of being complacent only to be beaten by a well prepared external candidate. In fact, many local candidates fail to carry out pre-interview visits and are often less informed than external candidates on the Trust’s internal matters.
But at the end of the day, does all this matter? If you go to an interview, you cannot turn up thinking that the job is someone else’s. Not only will this affect your confidence, it will also ensure that you perform badly and appear demotivated on the day. There are plenty of stories of outsiders beating the local candidate, even when the process was rigged. There are plenty of storied about preferred candidates falling apart through lack of preparation. And there are plenty of storied about second jobs being opened to accomodate an external candidate who performed well at an interview.
For more information about consultant interviews, visit our free information pages on consultant interviews. If you want assistance with your consultant interview preparation, why not attend our famous consultant interview course!





