The Warner Report in 1992 was established to review the selection, development, and management of staff working in children’s homes, and highlighted recruitment as a particular concern. Since the report’s publication, ‘Warner interviews’ have been developed for use within all settings working with children and young people. The Academy in the last academic year has seen staff retention increasingly become an issue, so we decided we had outgrown the outdated skills-based interview model and must now move to a new model that reflects the belief that we are a values-based organisation; we adopted Warner interviews in order to ensure that our new hires share our values.
A values-based interview is a structured interview that can stand alone or sit as part of a wider multiple interview process. A values based interview will ask applicants to provide examples of behaviour they have demonstrated to respond to a particular situation. However, the questions must also be probing to elicit evidence of learning and reflection, and it is these questions that provide an insight into an applicant’s values and what they consider to be important.
You can ask competency-based questions alongside values-based ones; however, in some cases it may be more appropriate to separate the two components out into two distinct interviews conducted by different assessors. This is the model we have found most effective, with a skills interview panel and a separate values interview panel.
