But in 1992 the polling firms got their sums wrong, telling their interviewers, for example, to interview too many blue-collar workers.There was also a more subtle problem.
All of these firms have increased the number of white-collar workers which their interviewers must seek to interview.
First, interviewers were told where to interview, most commonly in a particular parliamentary constituency.
Interviews are lousy selection mechanisms because interviewers are so biased and make decisions on the basis of first impressions: far better to give candidates a task similar to the one they will have to perform and see how well they do.
Interviewers no longer choose where to interview; a computer does that for them by selecting numbers at random.
Interviewers thus had too much freedom about whom to interview, and ended up interviewing too many Labour supporters.Can these problems with quota sampling be fixed?
Many case interviews are structured as a role-playing game in which the interviewers will act as clients, to approximate as closely as possible what the applicant will later be asked to do as a consultant.
"I wouldn't characterise all those people [ABC interviewers] as leftist – that's far too strong a term," he continued.
The excitement that interviewers seek in vain when speaking to Henman is provided on the court, where the British number one plays a brand of attacking, serve-and-volley tennis that is rapidly being replaced by the baseline belting preferred by most of the new generation of players.
But, as he explains why that's no handicap in his present post, he sounds remarkably like someone rehearsing his answer when asked it by the interviewers for the top job.
The UN said he had not followed protocol and in particular had failed to redact the identities of the children and the interviewers, potentially putting them at risk.
