Interview Candidates

Get the results you want by optimizing your interview process.

Interviews are an important but time consuming aspect in the employee selection process. You'll need to identify candidates' strengths and weaknesses, determine if their skills fit your needs, and get a sense of how they would fit with you and your team. Follow these interviewing tips to ensure that your interviews save you time and gets results.

Collapse all | Expand all

1. Create a hiring guide

   Interviews help you to assess if a candidate is a good fit for your business. A hiring guide allows you to prepare up front for your interview process. Guidelines also help in cases where questions of legitimate hiring arise.

   • Use a standard format when more than one person is interviewing.
   • Make sure all of your questions are legal and give you the information you need to make good hiring decisions.
   • Develop interview questions that will get the best information for your decision making.

2. Interview questions

   Traditional interview questions provide basic information about candidates' background and work history. Examples include:

   *What experience most qualified you for this job?
   *What are your most recent job responsibilities?
   *Have you ever supervised in any of your jobs?
   *What do you like most about your most recent job?
   *What are you most recent job-related accomplishments?
   *Why are you considering leaving?

   Behavioral interview questions are asked to see how candidates have performed in past employment-specific situations. Some hiring managers use them because they believe that past performance predicts future performance. Often this type of questions starts with the following phrases, "Could you tell me about a time when you..." or "What would you do if you ever..."

   Use the S.T.A.R. process to create behavioral questions that mirror your business' needs.

   Situation: Define a situation or set of circumstance to ask the candidate about.
   Task: What needs to be done?
   Action(s): What did or would the person do to accomplish the task?
   Result: What happened after the action(s) took place?