Interviewing job candidates is difficult. You must sell them on what you have to offer and assess them on their suitability in a short time. These 6 practices will help you do your hiring job well.

1) Make sure every candidate gets a good impression of your company. Most of them will not get hired, but become influencers elsewhere in the industry.

2) Take the opportunity in the interviewing process to educate the candidate on your company and its culture and values.

3) Give the candidates homework. They will enjoy it, and you will be able to observe how they carry out a task.

4) Have people from different parts of the organization interview the candidate. This gives you a broader picture of the candidate. As a bonus, the person who gets hired will come on board already knowing people across the organization.

5) In the interviewing moment, ignore the resume. Concentrate on the person you are trying to get to know.

6) Before you make up your mind, imagine in your mind what the best role for this human being is. Sometimes you have a great candidate, but they are great for some other job.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Interviewing job candidates is difficult. In a short time you need to sell them on what you have to offer and also assess them on their suitability to the job in question.

Here are six practices I follow when I interview people for a job.

1) The first rule I follow is to make sure that everybody who is interviewed leaves with a positive picture of the company. Let’s say you’re filling one hundred positions. You may be interviewing thousands of people in that process (maybe not you personally, but the organization). It is important that you leave them with a good impression, because those who you end up not hiring will become influencers in the market and the industry you operate in. You want them to have a good view and a respectful view of your company.

2) Practice number two is to use the interviewing time to educate your candidate. Educate them on the company culture, the values and the strategy and even details of the job – because people are at their most receptive when they are interviewing for a job.  They may remember word by word what you tell them. Take the opportunity to educate them during that process.

3) Give them homework. Ask them to write about their job, to make a plan, to assess something you’ve written. You thereby get an idea of how they operate, how they write, how they communicate. They will enjoy it because they’re learning about the job as they go.

4) It’s useful to have people from different departments interview the same candidates. You get a better assessment of the person you are interviewing. If and when they get hired, they will already know some of the people in the organization and they will feel more welcome in the organization.

5) When you interview it is good if you can ignore the resume, because you need to understand the personality behind the resume. You need to understand who the person is, what their strengths and weaknesses are. The resume does not necessarily tell that, so it is important to be able to ignore it and look through it and see the person you are interviewing.

6) Finally before I make up my mind on offering somebody a job, I try to see myself as the person’s mentor or parent or grandparent or something, thinking of what is best for that individual, for that human being. Sometimes I come up with a different role than the one we’re offering and I realize that it’s a great great candidate, but not the right candidate for the job. Turning the question around and asking myself “what’s the best place for this person” will help me determine whether it is the job I’m offering that is the best for that person.

Marten