You’ve done the hard work. You spent valuable time identifying your ideal candidate, skills, experience etc. You’ve written an amazing job advert to attract the right candidates and you’ve utilised your network. Your hard work has paid off. You have a shortlist to interview.
There is plenty of information in way of hints, tips and advice for candidates to excel at interview. Not so much for the interviewers. Effective interviewing, in my opinion, remains a skill people think they know a lot about purely because they have been doing it. Often poorly.
In a candidate short market, it is more important than ever to put that little bit more effort into interviewing. If recruitment were dating, then this is your first date.
What is an interview?
Noun: An interview is the activity of asking someone questions to see whether they are suitable for a job or course (Cambridge Business English Dictionary).
Interviewing invariably takes place in an unnatural setting and is not without its’ problems such as the interviewer being so preoccupied with time that the interview itself is conducted poorly or collects information of little value due to being unstructured..
For the purposes of this article, I will focus on the two most important areas of conducting an interview successfully:-
- Planning and preparation for the interview.
- Guiding the conversation
Planning & Preparation
The lack of adequate planning is the greatest single fault of the interviewing process. More often than not, an inexperienced interviewer launches into a discussion only to find that their preparation is incomplete, or they’ve run out of time, and/or they have come to the end of the interview and little qualitive information has been collected (it also takes a certain amount of self-awareness to know – that’s another story).
Do:-
- Prepare an outline of important points to be covered and share these at the beginning of the interview. This not only reflects consideration but creates a feeling of confidence and fairness.
- Allocate blocks of time to the areas you want to cover and also developing questions. If no time limit is established, there is a danger of the interview being out of control. Even worse, important information may not be discovered.
- Think about the logical flow of the interview. Prepare your competency areas in advance and use them as a reference point.
- To understand process, prepare ‘how’ rather than ‘why’ questions
Guiding the conversation
Having planned the interview, it is important for the interviewer to steer the conversation along the most productive channels so that a positive experience is delivered for the interviewee and the qualitative information required is collected. .
Do:-
- Start with a warm-up question that is easy to answer and will put the interviewee at ease. This helps build rapport
- Consider phrasing a question as a rhetorical one, so as to allow the interviewee time to think of a definitive response (although caution should be observed that the interviewee is not being ‘led’).
- Repeat phrases already expressed allows the interviewee to expand on an answer and provide details of a relevant issue.
- Restate replies so as to allow time for reflection, expansion or clarification of a point that was perhaps lost in the first instance.
- Use suitable non-verbal assurances and small inflections in the voice to give encouragement.
- Provide a succinct summary of information from time to time as this not only allows for clarity in the communication process but also gives the interviewee a mirror of just what has occurred.
This is by no means an exhaustive list and should be viewed a starting point. Interviews done well are informative and a great opportunity for collecting qualitative information that can be analysed and reviewed.
In the absence of Kristin G. Esterberg’s suggestion “If you want to know about what people actually do, rather than what they say they do, you should probably use observation [instead of interviews]” this is probably the next best thing.
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