Skip to main content

Improving Candidate Interviewing

Employment interviewing is an area where many companies fail to make good decisions about prospective candidates. Getting it right at this stage is critical. You can increase your success at candidate interviews by following these guidelines:

  1. Assign an interview team of two individuals to work together as the Lead and Colleague interviewers. Make sure they understand that they will be directly responsible for conducting interviews, evaluating and assessing all candidates for the position, and for making a final recommendation.
  2. Develop an interview schedule so that the interview team can organize their schedules to be available when interviewing commences.
  3. Develop a first interview questionnaire to focus on assessing whether candidates have the hard skills and experience required to do the job. This interview should be conducted by the Lead interviewer who has some knowledge of the function to be filled. The Lead interviewer should note candidate’s responses to the questions. The Colleague interviewer observes the interaction between the Lead interviewer and the candidate and notes things like body movements and other intangible issues and assesses the quality of the candidate’s responses.
  4. Develop a second interview questionnaire to focus on assessing candidates’ soft skills, such as intangible personal traits and characteristics, and how well you think they’ll fit in with your organization’s culture. Use behavioral-type questions that elicit experiences from their past experience. The Colleague interviewer leads this interview and the Lead interviewer is the observer, noting body movements and other intangible issues and assesses the quality of the responses.
  5. Review and discuss after each interviewer prepares an independent assessment immediately following each interview. At the end of the day’s interviews, the interviewers review their evaluations and recommendations and discuss differences in their perceptions.
  6. Consider having an independent personality assessment by a qualified practitioner when the two interviewers have markedly different evaluations.
If you would like to develop and implement a more effective recruiting and interviewing process using the highly-successful techniques described above, we can project manage an initial assignment while training and coaching your personnel through the entire process. If needed, we can offer support where you feel you could benefit from additional assistance. Contact Carl or call at 310-489-3115 if you would like to better understand how Carl can help you.