What Is A Panel Interview?

The panel interview is a type of interview where the candidate encounters several interviewers from different departments of the company all at once, constituting a group of three or more people. These interviewers will be, among others, heads of departments, team leaders, HR representatives, and other important people per job role. In ticking off a group of questions that covers a broad basis of issues and concerns like a candidate’s qualifications, experience, skills, and characters, one is expected to enlighten, convince, and deliberate–all at the same time. The disclosure may proliferate within given panels in turns while asking questions or focusing on a specific field by which the candidate is considered to occupy in the field.

Example of Panel Interview

A candidate in a software engineering job interview may encounter a group of panel interviewers such as human resources representatives and senior engineers than the hiring manager might. As part of the panel interview, they could be required to talk about the most complicated technical problem they had ever dealt with in their previous job and how they overcame it.

Another situation that best illustrates this is where the aspirant narrates how they had a duty to optimise a paramount performance component to ensure its proper functioning. They would break the processes down and describe their approach to analysing the actual codebase, identifying possible blockages, and suggesting solutions to improve the system's performance. Panel members might then pick up where they left off with some of the components of the candidate's strategy by asking them about how they made specific decisions, their collaboration with other team members and the effect of those optimizations on the general system's performance.