The history of the ProspectHR MMI. A Board member’s insight. 

When speaking of the history of our Multiple Mini Interview (MMI), personal insights and reflections are an important part of the story. In this article we spoke to Paul Grunthal, MSc and ProspectHR MMI Board Advisor. 

Paul, when and how did you first hear of an MMI? 

I was introduced to the MMI in the fall of 2006 when I moved to the tech transfer office from the Faculty of Science at McMaster University. The MMI was one of the first McMaster technologies I helped bring to market and I have been working with the team ever since. 

Why was the MMI important to pursue from a large scale POV and why was it important to you personally? 

I gravitated towards the MMI because I saw it had great potential. Before being introduced to the interview system, I was a career coach to Science students in co-operative education at McMaster. We taught courses on how to be interviewed and ran mock interviews. It was this experience that helped me appreciate how the MMI could simultaneously to:

1. Minimize interviewer bias 

2. Help select better candidates 

3. Give applicants the ability to overcome or recover from the pressure of an in-person interview. 

To me it seemed like a 'win-win-win' scenario. 

When did the idea of forming a company emerge? How did ProspectHR MMI come about? 

Initially the MMI was less than 100 scenarios on a CD and we had two clients. When we compiled a more formal product package and the developers became more active in research papers and conference appearances we were barely able to keep up with the number of licenses we needed to draft.

It was when we hit about 12 or 13 customers that we thought this could really be something bigger. In 2008, with two of the inventors present, APT INC was launched as the exclusive global retailer of McMaster's Multiple Mini-interview. 

Was there a time when you thought, "this is going to work!". Please share that experience. 

When APT launched the online portal version of the MMI in 2011 I knew this business was truly scalable and that we could reach customers around the world. Previously, I was manually sending out updates by mail. With more and more clients coming onboard this was becoming a very onerous task that needed to be streamlined and automated. From those early days, we now have clients on five continents that can access the latest MMI content 24/7.

What was your motivation for staying involved with the MMI and ultimately, ProspectHR MMI? 

I believed in the concept and I felt attached to the MMI. It was a winner that was going to make a difference in people's lives and careers. I had been an interviewer, a station writer, a content creator, and commercial advocate. The more I worked with the MMI the more I appreciated its elegant solution to candidate selection and to date I've seen nothing else that would change my mind.