Do you hold a bad interview?
August 31, 2010 
8 Comments
You would think as the interviewer, you could do no wrong. Unfortunately, if you are not on top of your game, you could very easily hire the wrong person, or let the right person slip through your fingers. A potential employee (especially a good one) is interviewing you as much as you are them. They want to know if the company will be fun to work for, if the boss is going to be fair and if the environment is one of growth and acceptance or if they are better off finding something else. The last thing you want to do is scare someone off who is perfect for the job because you are trying to play the ‘tough interviewer’. Of course, you also don’t want to be so lackadaisical that you accept anyone who walks through the door. It is important to remember that you need to be friendly, have good manners and that it is okay to enjoy the interview process. So, what can you do?
Interview potential candidates the right way by following this simple process:
- Take lots of notes on what they said and how they reacted. It will be difficult to remember everything 3 hours or a day later when you are trying to make a decision.
- Let them answer. Interrupting can go both ways – if you never let the interviewee get out a complete answer, how do you know what they were going to say?
- Ask them questions that require full answers. Yes or no questions don’t help anyone. Unless of course the question is “have you ever been arrested”.
- Use your gut. If it doesn’t feel right or it is too good to be true…make sure to think hard before offering a job.
- Keep the interview short, but don’t take short cuts. You want to make sure you have learned everything you can about the potential employee, but you also don’t need to keep them for hours.
- Smile! Trying to scare your interviewee does no one any good. Be friendly, and the interview process will be much easier on both of you.
And don’t:
- Make quick judgments based on one answer or one reaction. You need to use everything you saw and heard to make a good decision
- Ask questions that lead the applicant to the answer you are looking for. For example, “You are
computer-savvy, aren’t you?” - Make them wait. The worst thing you can do is attempt to assert your ‘power’ by making a candidate wait. Meet with them at the time you agreed upon!
- Let the Halo effect (the tendency to generalize one outstanding feature of a candidate as representative of success in) get you.
- Forget their name/say it wrong. It should be on their resume in front of you, so make sure you use it correctly!
What other tips can you share with business owners or H.R. departments looking to hire employees?
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These are all excellent. The first point, that candidates are interviewing employers, cannot be emphasized enough.
“The last thing you want to do is scare someone off who is perfect for the job because you are trying to play the ‘tough interviewer’.” I believe professional courtesy should go both ways. You can be the person of power, in control of the interview and still be a decent person that someone would want to work with/for.
Good article. A good interviewer will bring out th best in a candidate.
Great point regarding “it is okay to enjoy the interview”. I have been on both sides and have found that the suggested points of friendliness and manners, as well as open-ended questions enables you to extract the necessary information that may otherwise remain suppressed to make an informed decision.
Balance is important. By listening to the interviewee’s answers, not only do they get a more complete picture of who he/she is, but the interviewee also feels valued as a person and, if hired, will more likely pour a lot of effort into doing a good job.
I have a lot of tips – here are 3 of them:
“What would you do?” is not as effective as “What did you do?” – use example based questions, ex. Tell me a time you had too much work assigned to you to be able to complete it on time and how you handled it.
Halo effect isn’t only basing the entire interview on one good or bad answer. It is also judging the candidate based on something you share in common, do or don’t like about how the candidate looks or someone they remind you of, or because they remind you of a mini-you. It’s the wrong way to evaluate someone. Stick to their example based answers.
Don’t jump right into interview questions after the greeting. A good warm up allows you to engage in dialog that is much more natural than question and answer and will help you see personality, tone, pacing, body language and communication style (among other things). A good starter to a 15 minute dialog is “lets talk about some of the most memorable moments of your career”. You’ll learn a lot.
I can recommend interviwers to check for some interensting icebreaking interview questions . that will help them to start the interview on the right side.
for example a question like “If there was a movie about your life, who would you want to star as you and why…..”
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