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Interview Questions: Does Your Hiring Team Know What To Ask

Interviews are stressful, and not just for the candidates. Interviewers need to make important decisions that affect your business. Here’s how to ensure your team is properly prepared to assess job candidates.

  1. Choose the right interview questions for the job.
  2. Ask the right types of questions.
  3. Listen and take notes.
  4. Be consistent in each interview.
  5. Evaluate interviews while they are fresh.

Choose the right interview questions for the job

To choose the right interview questions, you need to know a job’s key requirements. Take the time to create a job description and profile that clearly identifies the most important skills and qualities needed for the job. The qualifications you are looking for will direct you in the questions you need to ask.

Does your new employee need to supervise other employees? Then ask questions that will demonstrate his or her leadership skills. Do you need someone who can think outside the box? Then ask questions that will allow a candidate to demonstrate his or her creativity. Here are some examples of competency-based questions.

Remember that it isn’t just about a candidate’s education and experience. You also need to know how to assess a candidate’s soft skills.

Your advance preparation will allow you to conduct an interview in which the questions get straight to the information you need to judge a candidate’s fit for the job. Find out more on how to avoid bad interview questions.

Ask the right types of interview questions

Once you know the questions you need to ask, plan how you will ask them.

The best approach:

  • Open questions
  • Situational questions
  • Behavioral questions

What to avoid:

  • Yes or no questions
  • Giving the candidate clues on how you want the questions to be answered
  • Questions that prompt a theoretical answer rather than demonstrating what a candidate would do in practice.
  • Asking too many questions at once, making it hard for the candidate to fully answer each part.

Listen and take notes

Most of your time should be spent listening and letting the candidate do the talking. Balance listening and making eye contact with the candidate with taking notes on their responses to your interview questions. It helps to divide tasks so that there is a note taker for each question as well as someone who will simply listen and provide a focal point for the candidate.

Create a form to help jot down key points to each response. This makes it easier for your team to note the main points and keeps them more focused on the candidate.

Be consistent in each interview

It is critical to interview each candidate in the same way. If you hold ad hoc interviews, you risk not asking the most pertinent questions. You will also have difficulty evaluating one candidate against the next if you do not have the same type of information about each one. Make your job easier by sticking to an interview plan.

Evaluate interviews without delay

Every interviewer must take time after each interview to write down all impressions about the candidate in an organized way. It’s best when the candidate’s responses to your interview questions are easy to capture in an online recruiting system. A cloud-based collaborative system makes it easy for the team to quickly provide important information collected from the candidate interview and make these evaluations available for a quick final analysis and decision making. This makes the evaluation process more objective and makes it easier to decide who would make the best fit.

Reach A Decision

Finally, a key reason for going through a rigorous hiring process and interview questions is to analyze the notes, evaluations and feedback from all those who have met and interviewed the candidates. This decision-making process is easier to complete when all the work prior to this stage has been completed and captured in the applicant tracking system in an organized way.Various scoring mechanisms allow the hiring team to assess the suitability of the candidate for the respective job. With all data easily accessible to the hiring team, decision-making is more transparent, much easier and way faster.

Interested in learning more about streamlining your interviewing and decision making processes? Discuss with us in detail.

Photo by Mikel Parera on Unsplash