Best Way To Conduct An Interview

Ask The Employee To Complete A Written Survey

How to Be Confident in an Interview: Best 4-Step Strategy | Indeed Career Tips

Consider asking the exiting employee to complete a written survey before your meeting. This will provide them with the opportunity to think about their responses in advance. You may find that the employee is actually more open in a written survey because they feel more comfortable. Plus, when you are able to read their thoughts prior to your meeting, you can develop questions that guide the conversation.

How To Conduct An Interview: Employer Tips +

Knowing how to conduct an interview is integral to a successful hiring process. If you are responsible for key hiring decisions within a company, then being able to effectively carry out a brief, professional, and telling interview is key.

When you conduct a job interview, you will be able to evaluate whether or not the job candidates will be a good fit for the team. But never forget that the candidate will also be evaluating your company through the interview process.

Having a clear idea of what it is you want to transmit in the interview and what it is you hope to discover about the applicant helps in selection. Jumping right into an interview blind is never a good idea, especially if you plan to secure top talent.

Do you know what kind of questions should be asked or avoided? As an HR admin, how exactly do you prepare for an interview? Is there anything else involved other than asking questions? Well answer these questions and help you avoid the most common hiring mistakes in this useful guide for conducting an interview.

Optimize Your Interview Process

Use A Mix Of Question Types

In addition to your must-asks, leave room for other questions that can help you develop a better picture of the candidate overall. Try using some combination of these interview question types:

Closed-ended questions call for a simple, informational answer sometimes just a yes or no. An example: Have you worked in an industry different from ours?
Open-ended questions require thought and oblige the candidate to reveal attitudes or opinions. For instance: What interests you most about this position?
Hypothetical questions invite the potential hire to resolve an imaginary situation or react to a real one. Heres one: If you had an opportunity to revise your early career path, what would you do differently?

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Consider What To Bring

The following is a list of things you should bring with you for a successful interview:

A printed copy of your resume
A list of references
Work samples and publications to show the employer
A list of questions to ask the employer
A notebook and pen to take notes

Build A Picture Of Exactly What You Need

Actionable Business Tips for Conducting an Interview

If you dont have a proper idea of the type of person that you need in terms of skills, experience and personality, then how are you supposed to determine a candidates suitability? Before the interview make a checklist of all the requirements for the role and then tailor your questions and means of assessing the individual so that you can evaluate all of the factors.

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Need More Tips For Interviewing Someone

The hiring process is hardly a walk in the park, and the job interview may very well be the trickiest part. But the good news is that you have an expert whos willing and ready to help. With Monster, you can get free access to cutting-edge hiring resources from interview insights to job market trends, and more to ensure that your business is attracting and hiring top-level talent.

Follow Up After The Interview

Even if you decide not to move forward with a candidate, its important to let them know instead of leaving them hanging. Following up shows that you respect the candidates time and effort and can create a positive reputation and candidate experience.

Once youve made your decision, make a phone call to successful candidates to tell them the good news whether its extending them an offer or scheduling the next round of interviews. Consider sending an email to unsuccessful candidates explaining what they did well and why you made your decision and make sure to thank them for their time.

Remain Professional From Start To Finish

The hiring manager isn’t the only person you need to impress. Be polite and respectful to everyone in the building. This includes the person who greets you as you enter and the assistant who serves you a coffee or tea before the interview.

Study The Candidates Resume Or Cv

How to Prepare for An Interview – The Best Pre-Interview Strategy | Indeed Career Tips

Look over the candidates resume. Using a blind resume might offer an opportunity to limit the influence of unconscious bias. You can familiarize yourself with their work history and background. Reviewing the CV in depth ahead of time ensures that you maximize the time you have in the interview. Why?

Many general questions are often easily answered with just a quick scan of someones CV. When you start with this knowledge already in hand, you can take advantage of the interview to really dig deep into the candidates skills and abilities.

You can also take the time to highlight any areas in their resume that may seem vague or unclear, or perhaps that contains something that may be unknown to you, such as a unique hobby. Allow the interviewee the opportunity to expand on those areas as it may reveal possible behaviors or personality traits that will have an impact on effective job performance.

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Allow The Candidates To Ask Questions

A job interview is not just about the interviewer asking questions and the candidate answering. During a job interview, it is important to give the candidate a chance to ask questions about the job and the company. It gives them an opportunity to assess if the position is the right fit for them and also gives us a chance to measure their interest in the job.

Allow The Candidate An Opportunity To Ask Questions

Once you’ve finished asking your questions, provide the interviewee with an opportunity to ask questions they may have. Be prepared to answer questions about the role, company and hiring process. While you may already have adequate notes and information about candidates, candidates may also impress you by asking interesting questions that show their enthusiasm for the role.

Prepare For The Candidate Job Interview

Youve found a potential candidate and the interview is scheduled. Awesome! Now its time to actually prepare for conducting the job interview. Heres another checklist with some best practices and things to do when preparing to lead a job interview.

Recap the job ad. Quickly go through the original job advertisement you created for the job. What is it again youre after, and what has your candidate actually applied for?
Study your candidate. Youve probably gone through their paperwork already when shortlisting applicants, but you want to refresh your memory. Collect and read through the candidates CV, portfolio, cover letter, and any other documents that they might have submitted with their application.
Outline the interview. You want to create a basic overview of how you are going to conduct the interview. When theres more than one participant, discuss internally who will be leading the interview and share your interview questions and what you want to discuss beforehand to ensure youre aligned.
Prepare your questions. One of the most important parts of conducting a job interview is deciding which interview questions to ask your candidate. This not only depends on the role youre hiring for, but also which step of the interview process you are in, as different steps require different types of interview questions.

Need help coming up with the right interview questions to ask your candidate?

Then check out our ever-expanding database of free interview question templates!

Make Time For Practice

Tips for Conducting and Participating in virtual Interviews

Practicing for your interview can always lead to some improvement. Ask a family member or a friend to interview you and get their feedback. You can also record yourself when answering their sample questions. Study how youre delivering answers and observe your gestures and other nonverbal cues.

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Provide Next Steps And Closure

The final portion of the interview is providing the next steps for a candidate. Let a candidate know when they can expect to hear from you regarding a final decision, or the next step in the interview process. This is a candidates final impression of your company, so thank them for taking time out of their day to interview, and properly escort them off your company premises.

Looking For Compatibility Not Just Likeability

We all tend to hire in our own image, but when it comes to how to conduct an interview, you need to look beyond immediate chemistry by asking questions such as:

How many hours a day do you find it necessary to work in order to get your job done?
How sensitive are you to accepting constructive criticism?
Describe the pace that you typically work in the office moderate, fast, or hair-on-fire?
How much structure, direction, and feedback do you generally prefer on a day-to-day basis?
Do you generally ask for permission or forgiveness when making decisions?

Some natural follow-ups to these types of questions would be to inquire about specific examples. So, for example, a natural follow-up to the last question above would be:

Tell me about a time when you may not have erred on the side of caution when you should have.

These types of questions help you to better match an individuals personal style to your departments corporate culture. Without rounding out these questions, you could end up with someone who can do the job technically but whos totally out of sync with the rest of your team.

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How To Conduct A Job Interview

The Indeed Editorial Team comprises a diverse and talented team of writers, researchers and subject matter experts equipped with Indeed’s data and insights to deliver useful tips to help guide your career journey.

Supervisors and managers are often responsible for interviewing for open positions within their companies. While knowing the right questions to ask when interviewing is important, there are other things you should know before you conduct an interview.

In this article, we will discuss how to prepare for and conduct an interview to effectively choose the best candidate.

Creating An Ideal Candidate Profile

How to Conduct a Phone Interview Best Practices

Before you start your interviews, its important to figure out who you are looking for to fill your open roles. At CareerPlug, the planning stage is an important part of the hiring process and involves creating an Ideal Candidate Profile using the following components: specifics for the role, key culture drivers, and the job description.

Heres an example of an Ideal Candidate Profile for a sales position at CareerPlug:

You cant know if youve found the right candidate if you dont take the time to figure out what youre looking for! Making these considerations before you interview can help you ask the appropriate questions and make better hiring decisions. To get you started, weve created a free Ideal Candidate Profile template you can use for your own hiring needs. Download it by clicking the button below.

For more on creating your Ideal Candidate Profile, check out this quick video from Natalie Morgan, our Senior Director of Human Resources:

Refine Your Interview Process

Lacking a standard interview process can make you five times more likely to make a bad hire. The fix is simple: to conduct structured interviews.

Hiring through structured interviews is one of the most valuable tips for conducting interviews you can ever get.

A structured interview is one where you thoroughly analyze the jobâs key responsibilities and prepare a plan to conduct the interview based on evaluating the needed skills for the role. This means you have documented:

the critical skills or competencies to look for in the candidates
the interview questions you need to ask to assess the candidates on the core skills they need to succeed in the role
a sample scoring system with a range of acceptable answers along with the points each answer is awarded.

In structured interviews, you arenât making up the interview process as you go. Instead, youâve prepared and planned. The questions are premeditated and ready to deliver.

Some hiring managers criticize structured interviews as theyâre typical and lack spontaneity, but their success rate is much higher than that of unstructured interviews.

Even unusual interviews are somehow structured, as they are planned with the competencies and skills of a successful hire in mind.

An ATS will make conducting structured interviews simple by tracking the interview process according to the role and saving question sets.

Tip #: Have A List Of Your Non

We recommend identifying the top technical non-negotiable skills that the person needs to have mastered in order to be considered for the job, and the main behavioural competencies required. Formulate your interview questions beforehand based on these non-negotiables. When you are writing up the interview questions, formulate them based on these.

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Ways To Conduct A Great Interview

12 Ways To Conduct A Great Interview:

Don’t conduct an interview, have a conversation. One of the biggest mistake people make in the interview setting is to conduct it like it appears in a magazine . Don’t make that mistake. Forget about the questions and just have a comfortable conversation. Keyword: comfortable.

Do your homework. The only way to avoid getting stuck asking questions is to do so much research that you don’t need them. Know your subject, know the issues and know what the public would want to know if they could sit down with the subject matter.

Don’t stick to your agenda. To make matters worse, most interviewers follow the questions that they have lined up in the order they wrote them, instead of letting it flow based on what the subject is saying. I’ve seen many great follow-up conversations and side-tracks lost because the interviewer was following their flow instead of the flow of the conversation.

Have notes, not questions. It’s OK to have some notes about concepts you would like to discuss, but don’t hold it in your hand and look down at it – that will break the conversation and turn it into an interview.

Ask open ended questions. Always start your questions or commentary with words like “how” and “why”. Those two words can never be responded to with the words, “yes” or “no”. If you want something more than one or two word answers, use words like “how” and “why”.

Do you have any additional tips and tricks for conducting a great interview?

Consider Your Interview Questions

When going into an interview, you dont want to read off a list of set questions, but you do want to have several key questions ready to ask. These are questions you know you need to ask in order to thoroughly report your story.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you brainstorm these questions:

Ask open-ended questions versus closed-ended questions. Open-ended questions are more broad whereas close-ended questions may simply elicit a yes or no response. Heres an example of an open-ended question: How did it feel when you lost the election? Heres an example of a closed-ended question: Did you feel disappointed when you lost the election?
Ask for specific examples or numbers. Its always best to show versus tell. The more specific, the better.
End any interview by asking, Is there anything else important that we havent covered?This gives the source a chance to share any additional information. Sometimes youll get a simple, Nope! But other times youll get some good information or a strong quote. If youre looking for more sources to interview, you can also ask: Is there anyone else I should speak with about this? The source may be able to point you to your next interview.

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Understand The Star Interview Format

STAR is an acronym that stands for situation, task, action, and result. It is an interview technique used to gather relevant information about a specific capability for a job. Generally, job candidates use the STAR method to answer behavioral interview questions. For instance, they may tell you about a time when they used a particular skill to overcome a specific challenge at the workplace.

If the interviewee does not use the STAR method to answer the questions, the interviewer can use it to request more information or create follow-up questions. For instance, we can ask the interviewee to be more specific or describe the results of their action.

Print Hard Copies Of Your Resume

Most employers ask for digital copies of your resume with the application, but they may not have easy access to it during the interview itself. Having copies to present to multiple interviewers shows that you’re prepared and organized. You should have at least three copies to provide for multiple interviewers, plus one for yourself to follow along.

During your preparation, read over your resume and rehearse explanations for any gaps that may appear or other oddities. For example, you may have taken time off work to care for a child or family member, switched careers or had other legitimate reasons for employment gaps. These can be a concern for employers, so it’s best to prepare your explanation to show them that you’re not a risk.

You may also encounter questions about your resume that are awkward. It’s important to be honest but diplomatic in addressing them. For example, you may have left a job because of your supervisor or manager, or policies that you didn’t agree with, but you don’t want to speak negatively about a former employer. Consider these possible questions and prepare your answers in advance, so you don’t accidentally say something you’ll regret.

Like the rest of the interview, it’s best to prepare for these questions by writing notes and rehearsing your answers out loud multiple times prior to the interview.

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