Recruit Better Employees With These Job Interviewing Tips

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Job interviewers are a chance to meet an applicant in person and assess whether you could really picture them working successfully within your company. Conduct poor interviews and you’re likely to make poor hiring decisions. To ensure that you get the best out of your interviews and end up recruiting the best candidate, consider some of these interviewing tips.

Schedule time solely for interviews

It’s important that you’ve freed up time solely to focus on interviewing and that you’re not trying to do other tasks too. Make sure that you’re waiting for your applicants at the agreed time when they arrive – don’t make them wait as this could show disorganisation and they may change their mind about working for your company. Allocate enough time for each applicant so that you can ask all the questions you need and really get to know each person. Companies that are hiring tend to be understandably short-staffed and there could be a lot of other tasks to take care of, but interviews should take priority and shouldn’t be rushed or delayed.

Try to put your applicants at ease

Anyone who’s been through an interview as an applicant knows that they can be nerve-wracking events. Don’t try to make your applicants uncomfortable just to test them, as this is likely to backfire and they may hate the experience so much that they don’t want to work for you. Aim instead to put your applicants at ease by offering them a drink and being friendly and polite. This will also allow a more natural conversation and you’ll get more honest answers from them as a result. You could even consider taking extra steps to accommodate for their needs such as hosting the interview via videoconference to save them travelling to the interview or even paying for their travel.

Research your candidates

It’s important to do your research so that you can ask the right questions. Don’t just rely on what’s written on their application – do some background investigation such as looking them up on social media to get an idea of their character as well as possibly contacting previous employers for references. Bring any notes and documents you need to the interview so that you can refer to these if you need them.

Ask meaningful questions

Avoid generic questions that you already know the answer to. Only ask them to repeat information on their CV if you want to test their honest – otherwise try to ask questions that aren’t answered on the applications such as specific tasks they may have done in a previous role or situational questions to get an idea of how they respond to problems. If you need to write down these questions, you should do so.

Consider scorecards

If you’re interviewing lots of different candidates, it could be worth keeping interview score cards to help tick off each requirement that each applicant meets. Any requirements that are a must are likely to be filtered out during the application phase, so focus on scoring preferential requirements. You may also use score cards to assess how well a candidate answers certain questions. At the end the end you can use this data to make a calculated decision as to who to hire rather than just relying on who gave the best general impression (although this is an important factor to consider too).

Get a second opinion

It could be worth get someone else to help you with the interviewing so that you have the benefit of a second opinion. This could be a senior employee or an outsourced recruitment professional. They may be able to provide insights about candidates that you hasn’t considered allowing you to make a better decision as to who to hire. They may also have different perspectives to offer – a fellow employee may be able to assess candidates as a fellow colleague, helping you to get an idea as to how well they’re likely to integrate with the team, whilst a recruiter may be able to approach things more logically and assess how well they’re likely to stick around in the long run.

Sell yourself and your company

Your candidates aren’t the only people that need to sell themselves during an interview. This process is also a chance for you to sell your company and all its perks to them. Your best candidates may have multiple interviews lined up and may receive multiple offers – they then have the power as to which company they choose to work for. Take the interview as an opportunity to show how great your company is by telling them all the benefits they could receive and by being friendly and enthusiastic. You may also want to tidy your office if you’re hosting the interview there as well as keeping yourself presentable.