How to be a good interviewer

March 8, 2023
7:42 pm

Joy Olaivar

Approach the interview methodically

1.1 Be prepared.
Before interviewing a potential employee, it’s critical to thoroughly prepare to avoid coming across as chaotic and unprofessional. Read the interviewee’s resume in advance to brush up on their qualifications and work experience, and print out a copy for use as a reference during the interview.

1.2 Choose your questions wisely.
Make a list of inquiries that are specific to the position you are searching for, such as inquiries about abilities, knowledge of the position, and prior employment. To get a solid sense of how the candidate responds to difficult circumstances, you should also include behavioral and situational questions. Such a list will help guarantee that you ask comparable questions of each contender.

1.3 Have an interview structure.
An unstructured interview might lead to you losing focus and squandering both your time and the candidates. The easiest approach to prevent this is to lay out a plan while you prepare for the interview.

For example, make the initial half of the interview a brief introduction and description of the key aims of the role and what your organization hopes to achieve, followed by interview questions. Provide the interviewee with one final chance to ask a couple of questions.

1.4 Take notes and listen carefully.
In every interview, taking notes is crucial. After the interview stage is complete, it will help you keep track of how each prospect performed and allow you to compare candidates. Clearing your thoughts will help you concentrate on the candidate’s words and identify any favorable or bad qualities. If you wish to evaluate the candidate’s responses correctly, you might also want to utilize a scorecard.

How to improve as an interviewer:

Discover your biases. We may or may not be aware of our unconscious prejudices, but we all have them. The way we evaluate candidates throughout the interview process can be impacted by our preconceptions. Consider taking a test, such as Harvard’s renowned Implicit Association Test, to identify your biases, so they won’t impair your judgment.

Interview with co-workers. If doing candidate interviews alone makes you uncomfortable, enlist the help of a coworker. By doing so, you can separate the interview into sections and distribute the questions. This will allow you both to take a break and listen while someone else speaks.

Be willing to go off-script. It’s wonderful to have a list of questions to refer to but attempt to have a dialogue with the candidate during the interview so that they can talk more about their prior experiences and the skills they have acquired. Sometimes getting additional information merely requires asking follow-up or exploratory questions.