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Are you interviewing someone soon? The chances are you‘ll know that unless you have gone through a structured interview process, you’ll find it difficult to know that you have found someone who is right for the job and for the company – as opposed to hiring someone you like.
Don’t fall into the trap of having an unstructured/informal meeting and making an instinctive decision based on your personal likes and dislikes – plan the interview and the questions to make sure that you are gathering the right information in order to make a logical business decision, following up with references and testing as necessary.
Tips for planning your interview questions
Revisit the job description for the role and make a note of both the essential and desirable criteria
Identify the key behaviours and experience someone would need to be able to do the job and fit in with the company culture.
Plan your questions to make sure that you are extracting the relevant information during the interview. You can use a combination of styles. Closed questions such as; Have you got experience of using PowerPoint? To clarify a candidate has a relevant skill which may be followed by a competency based question like ‘Can you please talk me through how you would put together a PowerPoint presentation’ to gather more detail as to the level of skill.
Identify the questions that are the most important, if the interviewee goes off track gently bring them back to the question or rephrase until you get the answer you are looking for.
Ask all the candidates the same questions so that you can compare the applicants and make a good decision.
As always the team at Sarah West Recruitment would be happy to give some guidance on the best questions to ask during the hiring process, give call us on 01392 873813.