How To Run An Interview

How Should You Conduct Interviews

Sometimes, being a good interviewer is described as an innate ability or quality possessed by only some people and not by others. Certainly, interviewing may come more easily to some people than to others, but anybody can learn the basic strategies and procedures of interviewing. We’re here to show you how.

How To Conduct An Interview In 5 Easy Steps

Talent acquisition leaders around the world face a serious problem: hiring managers who cannot conduct effective job interviews. Having trained managers from the deserts of Baghdad to the jungles of Nigeria and the open-space offices of Silicon Valley, I find that how to conduct an interview is something that always comes up as a topic of interest.

It often seems as if people believe they are given the skill of interviewing once anointed with the title of manager. But when faced with the reality of conducting an actual interview, these same people are without a process to manage or a set of tools to use.

The 5 Steps of an Interview

As I see it, the anatomy of an interview consists of five steps:

1. Interview Preparation

4. Closing the Interview

5. Assessing the Candidate

Before scheduling candidates for interviews, you should make sure to have a list of interview questions to ask each candidate. The list should be made up of both rapport-building questions and behavioral interview questions.

I will discuss when to use each type of question in an interview, but first, lets look at the five steps that make up the anatomy of an interview:

Step 1: Interview Preparation

The first step of an interview is preparation. This may seem obvious to say, but the fact is that preparation is the most overlooked part of the entire interview process.

Step 2: Starting the Interview

Some examples of rapport-building questions are:

In researching our company, what have you learned?

Discuss The Job Opportunity And The Structure Of The Interview

Once introductions are complete, its time to get down to why the candidate is here in the first place. This part of the interview will spotlight the actual job, duties, and reporting structure. If the role is a contract or a temporary role, you might talk about potential ways a candidate can move into a more full time role. Following a discussion about the job, give the candidate an idea of the interview format. Mention the type of questions, whether behavioural or technical-based. This portion should also include talking about the length of the interview, and what, if any assessments a candidate should expect.

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Ask Specific Questions Related To The Job

Before getting started with the interview, it is always useful to have a list of questions ready related to the job. Such questions can give the interviewer an opportunity to see how closely aligned the candidate is with the duties and responsibilities of the position. Going over the job description carefully can help the interviewer understand how to ask the right interview questions. If there are multiple candidates, preparing a list of questions beforehand can also help us compare the answers of different candidates.

How To Run An Effective Interview Process

• Post authorBy Peter Kibble

So far weve discussed the overall recruitment process and the role a recruiter should play in the process.

In this post Ill give an overview of what businesses should be considering going into a recruitment process and in turn how to maximise what they get out of said process.

• Goal of the Process
• Interview Process, Feedback and Testing

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Effective Steps To Prepare For An Internal Interview

8 Effective Steps to Prepare for an Internal Interview

Internal Interview When presented with an open door in your job, drive a Mack truck through it says none other than battle-tested leader, author, and speaker Miles Anthony Smith. Why not? There are many people who work diligently in the office, even overtime without get recognized or noticed. So, if opportunity comes knocking at your door, do not hesitate.

Promotion does not typically land on your platter easily, even if you are a well-recognized employee of the company. You may have to go through an internal interview to get the desired position in your workplace.

You have been through the interview when you got hired for the company, right? What is the big deal about doing it all over again now, when you already know the company? If you are thinking on those lines, know that, this is the mistake many employees make when they are facing the internal interview. Since, the interviewer is someone they see around the water cooler or the cafeteria, they do not take the interview seriously, thus jeopardizing a good promotion that would have worked in their favour if their prepared for the interview meticulously.

Effective resume making, job hunting, campus recruitment training & others

• Show your desire and enthusiasm
• Wait

Tips On How To Conduct An Interview Effectively

While conducting an interview may seem simple, its not an easy task. A lot of preparation goes into conducting an effective job interview. Unfortunately, many hiring managers do not prepare as well as they should for this critical step, leading to costly hiring mistakes. The cost of a bad hire is steep, and we are not just talking about salary. Training costs, severance payments, hiring a replacement, and customer service problems are things that can significantly impact a businesss budget.

An ideal job interview should give us a chance to learn more about the candidate and the candidate a chance to know more about the company. Learning how to conduct an interview is extremely important for hiring the best candidates for the business.

Here are some tips for conducting an interview effectively:

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Ask Open Ended Questions

If your questions can be answered either yes, or no, they arent working hard enough. Its tougher than it sounds to ask open ended questions, but its a skill that can be improved with practice.

Learn more about how to structure questions on my other article: The Importance of How and Why in this Design Research Methods collection.

Goal Of The Interview Process

The goal of most recruitment processes and in turn, the interview process are usually very similar:

• Identify the best person for a specific position
• Evaluate candidates against a set of technical and behavioural criteria to remove as much uncertainty as possible
• Make an informed hiring decision that will be the best fit for the specific role, overall business culture and the future employee

Ill go into a little more detail on each in the sections below however thought it worthwhile highlighting at the start.

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Why Should You Conduct Interviews

Using an interview is the best way to have an accurate and thorough communication of ideas between you and the person from whom you’re gathering information. You have control of the question order, and you can make sure that all the questions will be answered.

In addition, you may benefit from the spontaneity of the interview process. Interviewees don’t always have the luxury of going away and thinking about their responses or, even to some degree, censoring their responses. You may find that interviewees will blurt things out that they would never commit to on paper in a questionnaire.

Introduction To Hr Interview Process With Questions:

This Process Street HR Interview Process With Questions is engineered to guide a manager through a three-stage interview process for hiring a new member of the human resources team.

This template is developed to be part of a larger recruitment process outlined in How to Conduct an Interview: A Full Hiring Process With 11 Premade Interview Processes.

The process works as follows:

• Applicants are sent an application process to fill out via a checklist run link: Job Application Form
• The information from this application process feeds back into the interview process which is triggered on submission using Zapier
• The hiring manager screens the application and arranges the first interview if the candidate appears qualified for the role
• The information gathered in the interview process for the successful candidate is then fed back into the recruitment process to help with onboarding

Throughout this checklist, conditional logic is used to present differing next steps depending on the information entered into the template.

For example, in task 3 Review the candidate’s application if the manager decides the candidate is not sufficiently qualified the next task would be Inform the candidate they were unsuccessful. If the manager decides the candidate is qualified for the role the next task would be Run a screening interview.

Read Also: How To Reject An Applicant After Interview

How To Interview Candidates

Effective interviews expose potential red flags, reveal strengths, ensure that expectations fit with salary, compensation, and personality, and verify qualifications, skills, and abilities. They’re an essential part of the hiring process.

• Completely free trial, no card required.
• Reach over 250 million candidates.

How To Conduct An Effective Job Interview

The virtual stack of resumes in your inbox is winnowed and certain candidates have passed the phone screen. Next step: in-person interviews. How should you use the relatively brief time to get to know and assess a near stranger? How many people at your firm should be involved? How can you tell if a candidate will be a good fit? And finally, should you really ask questions like: Whats your greatest weakness?

What the Experts Say As the employment market improves and candidates have more options, hiring the right person for the job has become increasingly difficult. Pipelines are depleted and more companies are competing for top talent, says Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a senior adviser at global executive search firm Egon Zehnder and author of Its Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best. Applicants also have more information about each companys selection process than ever before. Career websites like Glassdoor have taken the mystique and mystery out of interviews, says John Sullivan, an HR expert, professor of management at San Francisco State University, and author of 1000 Ways to Recruit Top Talent. If your organizations interview process turns candidates off, they will roll their eyes and find other opportunities, he warns. Your job is to assess candidates but also to convince the best ones to stay. Heres how to make the interview process work for you and for them.

Further Reading

Dont:

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Youre Just Designerthe Participant Is The Expert

Your interviewing someone because you need their help. They are experts, they have more knowledge than you, remember this at all times.

You are just the designer.

Try not to lead the conversation and hold back the temptation to suggest answers Each interview is the fuel for your design process and you should treat each answer as a valuable resource. When you have this mindset suddenly everyone is very interesting.

Understand Your Role In The Interview

How to conduct an interview well will always lie in your ability to avoid common hiring mistakes and to assess potential talent in the interview process. But keep in mind that more new hires fail due to personality-culture mismatch than technical skills mismatch. Thats why you need to keep a keen eye out for compatible styles in terms of communication, pace, constructive criticism, and work hour commitments in candidates responses.

When youre figuring out how to interview a candidate, make sure you have a good balance between interviewing and educating. Follow the 80-20 paradigm, so that the candidate speaks for 80% of the time at the beginning of the interview, and you speak for 20% of the time after youve completed your initial round of interview question.

During your education period, always be willing to offer a good amount of career advice and direction. After all, every relationship gives us an opportunity to share our wealth of knowledge and experience with others: If you see the interview as an opportunity to give a gift to someone else whether you hire them or not youll find that the communication becomes a lot more natural and enjoyable.

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Preparing & Conducting Interviews

Being well prepared and then conducting an interview methodically will help you make the most of this important recruitment tool.

When interviewing job candidates, you want to determine what sort of people they are, how good their interpersonal skills are, how they might react under stress, whether they have the skills for the job, and whether they have been honest in their resumes.

Set Them Up For Success

You want the programming task given to be challenging, but everything else should be lined up to help the candidate succeed.

The candidate should not need to deal with vague instructions, unclear expectations, or the mind-games of trying to guess “what does the interviewer actually want”. They shouldn’t have to deal with antagonistic or hostile personalities.

If the real work environment is a good place to work, the interview environment should be too.

You want the candidate to be able to do their best. If you turn down a candidate, you want to be 100% sure you turned them down because, despite all efforts, they weren’t able to perform. You don’t want to end up hesitating, unsure whether a candidate did badly only because the interviewer was a jerk or the task given was vague and unclear.

Lastly, you want every candidate to have a good experience. Even if you don’t want to hire them, they probably have friends you would want to hire! Word spreads, and remember that during an interview, the candidate is interviewing your company as well.

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Practice Smiling And Then Do It

This last tip may sound silly but I encourage you to try it. Smiling is contagious and will be a great way to break the ice. Employers hire people they like. Therefore you want to be likable in your interview. The easiest way to be likable is to start your interview with a smile. It will also change your demeanor and even the tone of the conversation. If youre someone who gets serious when your nerves kick in you will want to really practice the art of smiling each and every day. After you have prepared your interview answers, record yourself answering a few questions. In the playback pay attention to whether or not you smile while answering. Then tweak accordingly!

Avoid A Robotic Introduction

When interviewing a candidate, always start by giving a short introduction to yourself, the company, as well as the vacancy you are hiring for. This may sound like a simple task, but it can be surprisingly easy to slip up here.

Avoid giving an unstructured, generic introduction, by simply rattling off information in the job description and company website. Instead bring the opportunity to life for the candidate, and give them an insight that they wouldnt have been able to find during their preparation for the interview. Explain how the role has evolved, why it is important to the companys purpose and objectives, and what a typical working day might look like. Talk about the company culture, the team dynamic, and your favourite aspects of working here. Ultimately, make the candidate feel excited about the opportunity and able to picture themselves in the role.

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Let The Candidate Make Mistakes

It is ok to let a candidate explore approaches or solutions you know will end up not working.

Very often, I’ve seen a candidate start ever-so-slightly down the “wrong” path to the solution, only to be immediately and vigorous stopped by the interviewer. They are then forced, via constant questioning, back onto the “correct” path, until they later diverge and again have to be stopped.

This kind of interviewer behavior isn’t entirely unexpected: as engineers, we loathe to see someone doing things the “wrong way”, and want to help them get to the correct answer as quickly as possible. This is something that is of value in our day-to-day work.

But interviews are not like day-to-day work.

One of the main ways interviews are not like day-to-day work is that it is a non-goal to get the candidate to successfully implement a specific algorithm.

The point of the interview task is to make the candidate work. It is almost irrelevant whether or not the task ends up being completed.

Thus, you should feel free to let a candidate make the “wrong” decisions.

Refactoring buggy code to turn it into correct code is one of the things that software engineers do day-in and day-out. By letting the candidate run with a mistake for a while, you then get a chance to see how well they do at this very crucial skill. Watching how someone rescues a broken piece of code they wrote tells you much more than watching them regurgitate a straightforward breadth-first-search for the n-th time.

Prepare And Memorize Your Must

Write down the items you know youll need to ask the candidate about based on the job description and your hiring criteria. Try to commit these core questions to memory. Then, you can focus on maintaining eye contact with the candidate, whether youre meeting in person or by video. That can help you create an interview experience thats more conversational and relaxed.

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Create An Interview Scorecard Using A Rating Scale

Create a simple rating scale and use it to rate your candidates answers during the interview.

Record or take a few notes about candidates answers to justify the ratings you give.

Using a rating scale ensures you can use candidates overall scores to compare them with each other instead of relying on gut instinct and first impressions.

An example of an interview scorecard

Remember: our gut instincts can be very unreliable especially when it comes to candidates who are often masters at selling themselves. Use the data to hire instead.