Joining the interview panel.
THREE regional selection teams made up of community members with special needs took part in the selection process for staff for the new Camphill England & Wales social work advisory project.
The teams included a number of members of Camphill Village Trust communities. They worked hard to assess the job candidates during three intensive days at Delrow, Taurus and the Croft. Six candidates were interviewed each day. They were asked to give a presentation to the community members, telling something about themselves and their work, and answering questions from the panel.
Aminta worked on the panel at Delrow with Rachel and Alex, assisted by co-worker Matthew.
"We started off at 8.30am," said Aminta, who is a member of the Camphill St Albans community "The first candidate gave us a handout to illustrate her presentation. She spoke about the kind of person she was and the work and experience she'd had. When she left, Matthew asked us about our response to this first candidate and we discussed our thoughts. We all seemed to agree.
"Then the next candidate came in. He used the projector and we followed the same routine with him as we had done with the first candidate. We followed the same routine with four more candidates. They used different visual aids. We all seemed to agree about them.
"It was also helpful to meet the candidates outside the interviews at lunch and in the coffee bar. It was most reassuring that the order we put the candidates in was the same as the order of preference of the co-workers. It was an interesting and long day."
Julia, who was on the panel interviewing at Taurus, felt that the experience had been valuable. It had been hard work but interesting to learn about the different people and their quite different backgrounds.
From the Croft community, Fiona found some candidates easier to talk to than others and Maria Isabelle liked it when candidates gave her time to say what she wanted. Gareth felt he could talk to all of the candidates but some impressed him more. He's looking forward to meeting the successful candidate again when she comes to visit!