When a candidate turns up for a job interview, they’re totally focused on making sure they impress enough to convince someone they’re worth taking on as an employee.
However, what they don’t realise is the interviewers themselves are usually just as nervous – and if anything – have to put in just as much effort to persuade the candidate this is a company they’re going to want to work for.
s1jobs realise it’s a dual-struggle, so we’ve come up with a useful list of seven different tips on interviewing, which could help any potential interviewers in the future.
1. Keep consistent and focused with your questions
A successful interview is forged between two parties working together to discover more about each other. As such, it’s important you make sure your line of questioning is focused and relevant at all times.
There’s no ‘right and wrong’ when it comes to this – every office and career has different needs and requirements – but once you formulate a set of questions you feel works for the position you’re offering, make sure to use them for every person you see applying for that specific role.
This can be helpful in several ways:
- It makes it much easier to compare candidates across different interviews.
- Consistent questions help you to know roughly where you are in the interview, keeping you on track.
- Once you’ve gotten through the first interview you’ll know what to expect for the ones that follow after.
It’s also important to make sure you’re asking questions which allow for an open-ended and lengthy response, as opposed to ‘closed questions’ which will ultimately give you vague answers from your candidate.
Leading questions can be detrimental to your efforts too. These will see the person you’re interviewing led towards certain answers naturally – which doesn’t really serve to give you an honest interpretation of them, as they’ve been encouraged and almost forced to give a particular answer.
Ultimately, it’s important to make sure your questions are fair for everyone involved, or else you won’t get the best possible outcome for your company. You might even want to follow the example of Scottish Water and provide sample interview questions in the application for candidates itself.
2. Be yourself – to a point
It’s tempting to want to portray yourself as the ‘big cheese’ of the environment, but the reality is that coming across as abrasive or a little arrogant is only going to turn people off from wanting to work for you.
People have an inane and biological ability to detect fakeness, so heading into an interview with a false persona is never a wise strategy to begin with.
Making a candidate feel as comfortable as possible will help them to open up and give a better performance of their own, so a stern portrayal of yourself is likely to have a hugely detrimental effect, whether they work out you’re putting on a show or not.
Similarly, as much as you might want to strike up a causal rapport among yourself and the interviewee, it’s crucial you don’t make things a little bit too chummy. These people aren’t primarily looking for new friends after all – and while an amicable environment in an interview might make things a little less awkward, it’s important not to let the tone and overall purpose of the meeting get away from you.
A Checklist To Remember:
Don’t be fake – people can detect it
Be open – make the candidate feel as comfortable as possible to get the best from them
Don’t get too friendly – it’s good for them to feel at ease, but they’re looking for a job
Ultimately, you have to remember you’re the person in charge of the situation and, as such, the highest level of authority in the room. Don’t act like a tyrant, but remember you need to keep your professional hat on, even if you’re tempted to let your hair down a bit with a ‘fun’ candidate.
3. Pay attention to non-verbal signs
Okay, we’re getting a little deeper than usual now – but the reality is that body language can say a lot about a person. This type of physical assessment is becoming increasingly studied, so there’s an understanding of what each different type of body positioning really means.
Perfect examples of good body language include:
- An open posture – where someone’s arms and legs are not crossed in any way.
- Solid – but not overbearing eye contact.
- Smiling – which suggests a friendly and amiable nature.
- Postural echoing or mirroring – which is the sub-conscious copying of your movements. This implies like-mindedness.
- A firm handshake – implies a confident personality.
Similarly, while certain traits will naturally have a positive impact, others could see you stand out for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the polar opposite of the body language listed above that’ll see you make a negative impact, including:
- A closed-off posture which sees you sit with your arms crossed in front of you.
- The inability to hold eye-contact at any point during the interview.
- A limp handshake – nobody likes a limp shaker.
It would be silly to base the success of a candidate off of these factors alone – if someone seems the perfect fit but has been sitting with their arms crossed the entire time, it doesn’t mean they they’re not right for the position – but it could make the difference between success and failure for those interviewees you’re sitting on the fence with.
4. Plot out how you want the interview to go beforehand
Sticking to an unrelenting and rigid interview structure is never going to work – you have no idea what factors might come up over the course of a discussion which could send proceedings down a totally different path – but having a basic plan in mind heading into every face-to-face can only serve to help things progress more smoothly.
Set out a very basic structure, and try to organise your questions into a set order where they are more likely to smoothly follow one after the other. Avenue Scotland provide the very sensible suggestion of writing out the six key components your new employee will be doing if they get the job.
It doesn’t have to be exactly six, but from here you can work the questions and tone of the interview around those factors, making it considerably easier to single out the person who you feel ticks all of the boxes. This can be achieved by subtly working out if they are capable of doing the jobs asked of them in those plotted-out key duties.
A Potential Interview Plan:
It might even be worthwhile letting the potential candidate know roughly how you’re going to approach things. While some people might see this as mollycoddling them a touch, it will make the interviewee feel comfortable from the outset and might serve to help them answer questions more efficiently if they know what’s coming next.
When it comes to tips on interviewing, it doesn’t get much more direct and to the point than ensuring you’ve gone into it with at least some sort of plan. Fail to prepare and you’re preparing to fail – that’s as true for you as it is for the person you’re screening for the job.
5. Look for signs of compatibility
It’s all well and good getting on with the interviewee, but does that mean you’re really going to be able to get the best results in a business environment?
For the most part there is no intrinsic link between someone who you might get along with as a friend and someone who could do a good job for you in an office or work sphere. Luckily however, there are key factors you can look for to see whether there is an actual chemistry in the making. These include:
- Whether or not the candidate is able to accept constructive criticism.
- If they feel they can work at the same pace as the rest of the team (a fast worker in a moderate team is good, but a moderate worker in a fast team less so).
- Whether their general attitude to the office hierarchy is in keeping with what you’d want and expect from an employee.
It’s certainly true a personality that matches and works alongside the rest of the people in your office or place of work is important, but, if they aren’t going to blend in a corporate sense as well, then a charming persona and a good wit don’t really mean a whole lot.
It’s good to find the perfect balance between someone who you feel comfortable with on a human level and a person who also has the ability to work to the required standard you’re asking of them.
Admittedly, that’s a hard middle-ground to find, but if you structure your questions around those earlier points, you should be able to find your perfect candidate.
6. Don’t do too much talking
t’s good to chat a bit during the course of your interview, but you don’t want to be sitting there the whole time taking up valuable minutes where the candidate could be telling you some useful information.
Remember the whole reason you’re there in the first place is to learn more about them. The only skill of theirs you’ll pick up by ranting at them the whole time is discovering they’re a pretty decent listener.
Dedicate around 20-30 percent of the interview to explaining the role, the duties of the position and asking questions of the candidate – leaving them with the rest of the time to help give you a clearer picture of whether they’re right for you or not.
This harks back somewhat to the previous point about not overstepping your boundaries. Remember, while you’re running the show, that doesn’t give you the right to steal the spotlight. Take a backwards approach and let the interviewee spill their guts to you. The more you let them ramble, the more you’ll find out about them naturally.
7. Assess if they really want the job
This step might actually be more important than any other when it comes to tips on interviewing, as it will determine whether or not you’ll be bringing someone into the team who actually wants to be there long-term.
Finding the perfect candidate is all well and good, but if they have no desire to actually get stuck into the profession, in time they’ll eventually begin to falter and produce continually shoddier work.
There’s no guaranteed way to know whether the person you’re looking to bring in will fit that criteria, but you can at least get a better understanding of whether they are, or not by assessing:
- What they know about the organisation (background research shows a desire).
- Where are they looking to be in five years’ time? Is their future in this industry?
- Do they have any sort of passion for this industry, or is it just as a means to make short-term money?
- What is it about your company that stands out from competitors?
If you approach things from this perspective you’ll have a better understanding of whether the candidates you’re interviewing are right for your company, or if they might just bin it off after a couple of months when they realise it’s “just not for them”.