This is the third year Singapore is hosting the Formula 1 race, and it is also the last year in which CAMS consultants are here with us. From next year onwards, we will run our own show. From the first year of having Formula 1™ in Singapore, CAMS have trained us and imparted their (more than 20 years worth) of race officiating knowledge to us. Last year, we took over in most of the roles and finally this year, CAMS will be back in an observing role to ensure that we do a good job.
Race officials who performed well during the trainings and the race are recommended by their senior officials to take on more responsibilities. From these recommendations, the candidates are selected for the interview if they have good attendance for the trainings and they are good looking.
The successful candidates will be promoted to become senior officials and sent on overseas training, which for both last year and this year, they are going to Clipsal 500 in Adelaide, Australia. The senior officials will also have to attend more trainings sessions locally than general officials.
Another role senior officials need to take up is to become trainers to train the new or returning officials. These officials takes on the role of "Trainers" and have to go through additional "Train-the-Trainers" modules. The selection of trainers is very much more complex, but I believe it still boils down to good looks.
This year, there are 36 candidates for the senior roles. There are 6 of us in the panel and we divided ourselves into 3 groups taking up 3 interview rooms. (The astute readers would realized that such each group interviewed 12 candidates).
There is a chair outside of each interview room, where the next candidate sits to wait for his/her turn while the previous candidate is in the room. I don't like this arrangement as it reminded me of a time during secondary school where we had to go through a mandatory medical checkup; which we had to take off all our clothes. I remembered sitting outside the examination room in a similar settings.
Well, I'm glad I'm not one of the candidates.
For that matter, I'm glad I'm not a doctor since I do not wish to see any fellow race officials naked or I'll have to wash my eyes with Dettol.
We have a scoring matrix on different aspects we would like to see in a senior official and the two interviewers will score each candidate and add up the score. We would rank the interviewees first based on the score, and later make adjustments on the rankings based on previous feedback from the senior officials. In this way, the candidate with the highest ranking may not have the best (interview) score. But this usually happens for candidates with 1 or 2 points score difference with the next. I cannot give other details on what went on during the interview.
On general, this is very much like a job interview. Some candidates are more prepared than the others. Everyone said they are excited about the 2010 races (it's either this or that the 2010 race will be interesting) when asked. One thing I've learnt from this interview is that if you want to stand out, you should think of how other people would answer a given question, and give something extra in your answer.
After we had finished all the interviews, the 6 of us re-grouped and went through a round of debate to decide on the names to put down as senior officials for 2010.
Other than the chair-outside-the-room, I felt that a 10-15 minutes interview is too short to make a judgement on the suitability of a person to stand in front of other officials and being able to lead them (or facilitate or whatever other politically correct words to use). We do know that some candidates did perform very well during the race, but was under par during the interview. The good thing is that we recognized this and have made some provisions for these candidates. And thank goodness that we have the autonomy to make decisions on the selection process of senior race officials. We can keep improving this process to ensure we get the best quality people each year.
The results should be out by 29th Jan 2010. So we will be having our Chinese New Year holidays and first senior training will start on 27th Feb 2010.
I believe the team of new senior officials this year will do us proud.
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