Employee Selection:  The Interview

One of the most critical elements in the team selection process is the interview. If it’s handled correctly you get the team members your company needs.

The interview gives an employer the opportunity to find someone who will “fit in” with the organization. The process involves matters of personality assessment as well as simply evaluating knowledge, skills and experience.

An interview process has to incorporate the principles of fairness, equity and courtesy. Keep this in mind when planning each step.

The first chance you have to assess hopefuls for any position is to look carefully at their applications. This task will be made easier if you’ve given all applicants a list of “essential” and “desirable” characteristics for the role.

Then comes the interview. Interviews can be either formal or informal, one-on-one or of the panel variety. The style of the interview should be a strong reflection of your company and the importance you attach to the position.

Be professional in your approach to the interview and set out to leave every candidate with a positive impression. Whether it’s the owner of the business or senior staff conducting the interview some serious preparation is necessary.

The position’s parameters must be thoroughly understood. Interviewers should have already developed a clear picture of the ideal person for the job including subjective factors reflecting the personality of the business itself if this is relevant.

Interaction with co-workers may be the only way in which the candidate can achieve success in the role, and mismatched personalities could cause a negative effect for everybody.

Interviewers also need to study every application form in detail. This will be the first opportunity to compare each candidate against the others and make a preliminary evaluation how they match up to job criteria.

Work out how long the interview will take before making appointments with candidates. This will avoid having a lot of “dead time” between interviews, or what can be even worse, having a backlog of candidates sitting in the waiting area looking at each other.

Make sure that interviews run tightly and without unnecessary delays. Interviews are stressful on all parties and wasting time only adds to that stress.

When candidates arrive they should be greeted by someone who recognizes their name and is expecting their arrival. The interview room and its layout need a bit of consideration to generate the best possible results. Privacy and freedom from interruptions is critical. No passers-by and especially no telephones!

Position everyone reasonably closely so candidates are actually interacting with others in the room. This helps you to evaluate how they’ll fit in with others on the staff.

Try to ask the same questions of every candidate. These should be questions that are relevant to the vacant position and that all candidates could reasonably be expected to answer.

The candidates’ answers should reveal what you need to know about them – their ability to think under pressure, their style of management, their approach to responsibilities and their potential to contribute to the organization.

Take careful notes on each candidate during their interview. The first impressions they make on you will be the same they make on your staff and clients.

References are important but shouldn’t be seen as the determinant as to whether a preferred candidate gets the job. First, no sensible candidate would ever nominate as a referee a person who would give a less than favorable report. Expect to hear good news and only good news.

For this reason, referees themselves need to be given a bit of an interview.

Develop a set of common questions for referees, which include ‘unexpected’ questions likely to draw comment on the candidate’s behavior. “How do you think (candidate) would react to dealing with aggressive clients?” or, “In your opinion, can (candidate) put in a lot of extra hours when the pressure’s on?” are examples.

When you look back on the whole selection process you’ll find that the most important element was the interview. The face-to-face interaction is always the best way to evaluate a candidate.

Also keep in mind that the interview process is never guaranteed to find the ideal person for the job. That person may not have seen your advertisement or might be employed in another firm and is not yet ready to change employers.

It’s better to go through the whole process again from start to finish than to make a faulty decision that creates dissatisfaction on both sides of the equation.

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Copyright 2003, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.