How managers and supervisors can avoid becoming blundering interviewers.
When your managers or supervisors interview job applicants, are they prepared? Have they been properly trained in effective interviewing techniques? More importantly, are you losing out on attracting top-tier talent due to sloppy interviewing?
Effective interviewers avoid rushing to predefine a candidate.
If an interview lacks structure, you may find that an untrained and unprepared interviewer has sat down with a candidate and asked questions of a vague or general nature: “Well, tell me about yourself,” etc. When this happens, interviewers also have a tendency to make up their minds about the candidate right away, even in the first five minutes of the interview.
Then, as it happens, the tone and direction of the interview quickly shifts and turns. When interviewers make up their minds too quickly, you may find that the nature of the interview normally changes, as well. Many interviewers will then start asking questions that serve to reinforce their ‘already-made-up’ minds.
Shouldn’t interviewers just trust their initial instincts? Research points to how that approach ends up working against a successful interviewing process. If an interviewer quickly forms a negative decision about a candidate, the interviewer may wander off the topic or stray from the purpose of the interview altogether. For instance, in these situations, an interviewer might start shooting the breeze by discussing sports teams, etc., because they have already made up their mind about the candidate.
Or they might even toughen up the interview to justify making a negative decision early on in the process. They may ask questions designed to be difficult to answer, so a negative decision can be justified. Successful interviewers allow candidates opportunities to define themselves.
Today’s successful interview is reflective of a new era, one that tosses out the ‘one-size-fits-all’ interviewing approach.
Recruiting and interviewing specialists now view those types of generalized interviewing questions as ‘old school,’ lacking in focus and structure. Fortunately, successful businesses are moving away from that type of approach.
I’ll share an academic-setting example to help illustrate. When my university allows graduate students to interview prospective students, we first train those graduate students in developing and structuring their interviews. As part of the training process, for example, we remind them of their own personal interviewing experiences. This reminder helps draw attention to how they felt at the beginning of their student/academic lives.
In laying this foundation, then, we ask other specific questions such as: “How would you recount and recall your own interviewing experience? How did those questions made you feel? What questions did you find easy to answer? What questions were difficult to answer? What questions made good sense?”
In the next phase of the training process, we ask the graduate students: “Were you aware that your interviews were structured? How do you think your interviews were structured?”
Usually these graduate student trainees answer that they had no idea that their own interview experiences were carried out in a structured manner. Their recollections usually speak to only memories of meeting other students. And actually, this structured format is how we want it to come across—as seamless and not obviously apparent during the interview.
When an interview is well done, the interviewee should not experience a sense of being taken apart, so to speak, item-by-item and word-by-word. We don’t want our interviews to come across as though we’re part of a Senate subcommittee hearing. In contrast, the tone and format should give the general impression of a welcoming one. An interview is not the time or place for rude or combative-type questioning.
And remember, these potential employees will serve as your valuable human capital. From the very beginning, starting with the interview, you want to treat them with the same respect and concern that you show your company’s bottom line.
If you want to learn more about improving the interview process, read my other HRTools.com Insight titled, “Improve Your Hiring Success Rates: Start With an Interview Assessment.”