Top Five Tips For Interviewing

Recruitment & Selection is an important HR activity in every business, if you are a new business taking on your first employee or a multinational recruiting for a whole department, the interview is one of the most important tools within your recruitment and selection strategies.

It can often be the only chance you get to meet face to face with your potential new employee and for them to meet you.  To try and help you get as much as you can from this process todays blogg gives you our Top 5 Tips on conducting a successful Interview.

No 1 – Questions

Have a good and appropriate set of questions lined up for the interview, know what you are asking and why you are asking it.  What is a good response to your question and why?  You want to determine if the person or people you are interviewing can do the job and are the right fit for your organisation.

No 2 – Notes

Keep notes of the interview and the responses to the questions you ask (see above), it is always handy to be able to refer to these notes.  It maybe that the interviewer wants feedback as to why they didn’t get the job or where they can improve.  There is always a lot of information to process when conducting an interview and its handy to jot down key points that you can refer to later.  A good way to keep notes is design an interview form listing the questions you are asking and the responses you are getting.  It can also be useful when comparing applicants.

No 3 – Ask Leading Questions

This can be difficult but with a bit of planning you can stay on top of it.  There is a big difference between “did you enjoy your last role” and “Tell me what you enjoyed most about your last role” .  Use expressions like, tell me about that, how was that, what did you like / not like about that etc

It’s about trying to help the candidate feel at ease and give you as much relevant information as possible so you can make the right decision.

No 4 – Another Person

It is always useful to have more than one interviewer (if you can) an extra person can be invaluable to the process, from sharing notes and thoughts, to taking notes while you are asking or explaining something tricky.

N0 5 – Exam / Test or Checks

It can be very helpful to design a test or exam to make sure that the person you are interviewing really knows their stuff, it doesn’t have to be too formal or structured but you do want to know that they can do the work you are asking them to do.  It could be a typing test for an administrator, a technical exam for a technical role there are lots of things you can do to make sure you have the right person.

We hope you found this useful but if you would like any more information about Interviews, HR Solutions, HR Support or HR Consultancy for small businesses please get in touch.