How to Conduct Better Interviews
The way we hire people is changing. While in the midst of a job market where companies are racing for talent and competing to close candidates, there’s never been a better time to shine a light on your hiring process and ask yourself, how can I do better?
Here at Hireguide, we help you elevate the most important piece of hiring process: your interviews. Interviews tend to be resource intensive, time consuming, and they often don’t do a great job at telling you whether someone is going to be an awesome hire. This is because people tend to treat job interviews as casual conversations, and they rely on their gut instincts when it comes to decision time.
But the art of interviewing is actually a science, and there is a way to do it better. Give your interview process a makeover with structured interviews.
A structured interview might sound intimidating, but it’s actually quite simple. The following are a list of tactics that Hireguide uses to help you transform the way you interview.
- Select a few key skills to assess that are absolutely essential for your role. Hireguide shows you a list of the top skills associated with your role, and asks you to select the most important ones. Be strategic here. You’d be surprised at how many hiring managers try to assess everything in the job description. Not only is it unrealistic in the few hours you have, but the chances of you finding a candidate that actually has everything is super slim. Somewhere between 5 and 8 skills is the sweet spot.
- Be thoughtful and selective with the questions you’re asking. This may seem obvious, but ask questions that actually assess the skills you’re looking for. Hireguide helps you do this by suggesting questions that are most closely related to your specific role. These questions were developed by behavioural science experts who analyzed hundreds of roles and thousands of skills to generate the most suitable content for your role.
- Ask multiple questions about a particular skill. Let’s say you want to assess ‘emotional intelligence.’ Hireguide recommends asking two different questions about the candidate’s emotional intelligence. Doing this will help you get a more accurate perception of that skill and help you determine whether the candidate demonstrates that skill consistently across different situations.
- Ask the same questions to all candidates. Just like comparing apples-to-apples, this ensures you compare candidates-to-candidates because you assess the same skills in everyone. Hireguide does this by saving your question template and guides you to ask those specific questions in each of your interviews.
- Score your candidate’s responses. This helps you judge each candidate’s skill set instead of other irrelevant information you might gather during the interview. Hireguide allows you to do this both during and after the interview - you can choose what works best for you. Scoring responses enhances fairness and allows you to compare multiple candidates on a level playing field.
We’re on the verge of a radical transformation in the way we hire people, and we built Hireguide to help your business transform its hiring process and do better. Doing better means more candidates saying yes. It means fairer hiring decisions. And, most importantly, it means you’re not only closing that role, you’re closing it with the best person for the job.
Ready to conduct better interviews?
See how Hireguide uses tailored content, transcription, and candidate scoring to elevate your interviews. By suggesting skills and questions tailored to your role and guiding your conversations with prompts, we’ll make scoring and comparing candidates easy. Start conducting better, fairer interviews now, with Hireguide.
