Reorganisation and trying to avoid suffering through an interview

[givemushypeasachance]

I'd welcome any advice on this scenario and how I might go about trying to avoid the horrors of interviewing!

I work in the civil service. Pre-2009 I worked in one function, then after a reorganisation that role disappeared and I started with a new team. It's a small team and we all came from other areas of the business, arranged via a paper exercise of statements of suitability and manager assessments - none of us had experience, they trained us up to fill this pretty niche role. Now we're reorganising again to meet 40% budget cuts (what fun!) and some people have lost their roles entirely.

At my grade two different functions are being combined - a group of us in job A are being joined in with a colleague from elsewhere who does job B, and in the new team we'll all do a mixture of job A, job B plus some new job C - supposedly it'll be more efficient! One colleague decided to leave to avoid all this fun, and one is cutting their hours when they come back from maternity. That means we have met our part of the budget cuts and we have roughly the right number of people for the new roles. However as we are only 'indirect matches' to the new job we have had to reapply and complete statements of suitability.

Our managers were hoping that this could all be done as a paper exercise, as long as we completed our statements properly and demonstrated we'd cope in the new role - it's a mix of the job we've all been doing for three years plus some new work from a related field, we've all adjusted to much more before. But a few levels up our Divisional Manager seems to think we should have interviews - partly so we can appreciate the 'culture change' and that this is a new job, we can't just be slotted into roles because that's the easy option. We don't entirely see the benefit of forcing us to endure interviews if we can satisfy the requirements on paper, so I'm searching for arguments beyond 'you're mean making us do this for the love of God please don't make us do interviews'. It's all been a long and protracted exercise, and we've got two people off on maternity leave who are particularly dreading the thought of coming in after six + months out of the office and having to interview. Any suggestions on a sensible and diplomatic approach I could try?

If we seem suitable on paper then I can't see what benefit the team or wider organisation would get from the interviews - anything about development needs could surely be gathered on a more informal basis or through a skills audit - job interviews really only show how you perform under pressure, they're not going to reveal anything that would assist the formation of a new team. And incidentally to all this if any of us didn't get the new roles then we'd be classed as surplus and would still be a burden on the organisation since they want to avoid redundancies; only we'd end up probably being slotted in to another team elsewhere doing work we don't have experience in. Which sounds very efficient!

[jkklpu]

Don't they usually say the job has to be 50% or more different to justify interviewing?

[givemushypeasachance]

I don't know jkklpu - I'm not sure what breakdown of 'difference' this new job is going to have either; no one, not even the managers, fully understands how it's all going to work in practice as yet. Which made trying to write the statement of suitability a challenge!

[flowery]

Research about which selection techniques are the best predictors of job performance

Clue: not interviews..