THE INTERVIEW (PT 2)

The key to ensuring that an interview produces the right person for your role is to ask good questions. That might sound obvious, but it's amazing how many interviewers do not prepare as well as the interviewees.

If all's gone well in your recruitment process to date, then you'll now be faced with the task of interviewing good quality candidates who are relaxed and ready for a face-to-face meeting with you. And you can be quite sure that the better the quality candidate, the more likely they are to have prepared well.

If you try asking good interview questions without a detailed understanding of the experience, skills, success measures and behaviours you are expecting, that means you'll be relying on little more than 'gut instinct' about a candidate and whether you liked them or not -   rather than being certain that they can carry out the role you want them to. It's a brave - or foolhardy - person who'd risk the health of their business on the strength of their instincts alone. What's more, it is impossible to rationally and fairly compare multiple candidates if you don't have a very clear picture of what you've learned about them via their interviews.

Fortunately, if you have been following the steps I have outlined to date, you will have a detailed job description with sets out your expectations for the role, that you created at the start of your recruitment process. It is that job description that you can use to help formulate your questions.

A Question Of Style

This week we will look at the style of questions that should be asked to ensure that you know that the candidate is the right fit for you.

(Next time we'll look at the types of questions and then in the following edition we'll focus on actually constructing interview questions you might use 'for real'.)

So, looking at the style of question to ask, there are five key criteria to ensuring that your  questions will be effective and elicit the information you need to make an informed recruitment decision.

Ask Historic Questions. You want to know about the candidate’s behaviour so you need to know how they have behaved in the past. Future-based questions won't tell you how they will do something. You'll just hear about how they think they would do whatever it is you've asked about or, worse, how they think you might want them to do it.

Future-based questions ("how will you", "how could you" etc) should only be used towards the end of the interview, once you've established that the candidate has demonstrated the right behaviours for the role by answering historic questions ("how did you") satisfactorily.

Ask Questions Related To The Job. Questions should only relate to the job. This is what you are interested in and behavioural questions around their previous roles will let you know the behaviours you can expect in connection with the role you're trying to fill. Asking personal questions in today’s litigious environment could easily lead to actions against you. Besides, if you think about it, what would you gain from knowing about their personal life? People often have a work persona and a home persona and the two can be quite separate - hence the tidy, organised work environment and the home that looks like a bomb site. (Maybe that was a personal observation!)

Ask Work- And Role-Relevant Questions. The questions have to be relevant. I have heard of many interviews where a tangential question is asked which is totally outside the requirements for the role, with the pretext that it will test the candidates ability to "think outside the box" or "think on their feet".

Perhaps, for a very few specialist roles this approach might be a useful test of somebody’s creativity but even if that's the case, it moves from the scope and format of the interview you explained to the candidate at the start and will make them wary and uncomfortable. This can result in you not obtaining the most constructive answers to your more relevant questions and might well make the candidate think that you're not offering a working environment they would enjoy. It is better to ask questions that have the express purpose of obtaining information around their past behaviours so that you can properly understand whether they can carry out your role or not. If you want to ascertain whether someone can "think out of the box" because that's what the role requires then that's fine - but you don't have to do so by oblique and difficult questions.

Ask Questions That Are Simple To Answer. You are trying to find out whether the person can carry out the role for you or not. Ask simple questions and the candidate can provide the information you require. Ask difficult or multi-part questions and the candidate has to pause and think and carefully frame a response that might well be verging on the theoretical, as opposed to simply replying about how they've acted in the past. Remember, you are looking for evidence from past behaviour that they are able to carry out your role. A number of short and straightforward questions make it easy for the candidate to provide the answers and make it easy for you to deduce whether they are the right person. Long, complicated questions generate long complicated answers which can easily wander off into areas that don't interest you. That can result in you losing control of the interview as well as leaving you at risk of not obtaining the information you require.

Preclude Waffle.  Ensure that the questions you ask only have one specific answer. Answering “talk me through your career?” could take 10 minutes and leave you grappling with a long and complicated answer through the fault of the question and not the candidate. Open-ended 'invitations to talk' such as "talk me through your career", also mean you can lose control of the interview. They also mean the candidate can tell you what they want to tell you and not what you want to know. So, instead, be specific about the part of their career you want more information about. A question might be "when you were at X Company how did you carry out this (function or activity)?" "What were your results (in this function or activity)?" You are still asking open questions (as opposed to questions that can be answered with a 'yes' or 'no') but you're ensuring there's only one area to be covered in the answer. Subsequent structured, detailed but simple questioning will mean you'll gain the specific information you require and retain control of the interview at all times.

Next Time

With those as the style of question to ask, next time we'll focus on the types of question.