Effective Interviewing – 5 Steps

By Sahzaidi

Most managers conduct job interviews without any structure or strategy or method. I am also guilty of this on many occasions because I felt it was going to be quite easy to assess the job applicants. Now I know that I was wrong. Without a strategy and methodology, you end up selecting a person based on an overall impression and intuition rather than a diligent scrutiny of the applicant's abilities and potential. This can often lead to the wrong person in the job. So how does one ensure better selection?

Well, there are no guarantees of course but here are 5 things you can do to ensure the odds are tilted in your favor. …

1– Write down your Questions Beforehand

Without prepared questions, you are almost certainly going to forget some things you wanted to enquire about from the job seeker . You are also likely to deviate from your agenda based on how the conversation flows. Thinking about questions during the interview is Ok but it isn't a substitute for a prepared list.

2- Probe Technical, Functional and Personal Areas

You must make it a point to address all these three following areas in your questioning:

Technical: these will be skills related to the work domain and expressed as nouns such as finance, sales, operations etc

Functional: these will be typically people handling skills and expressed as verbs such as organizing, planning, communicating, delegating etc

Personal: these will be essentially personal qualities expressed as adjectives such as ethical, professional, team worker etc

3- Use Behavior Based Interviewing

Ask candidates to describe past experiences or situations that can help to provide some clues about their competence in each of the three distinct areas above ie. Technical, Functional, Personal.

So for example to assess the Technical component, a behavior based question to a person being interviewed for a sales job might be:

"Give me an example of a time when you were able to acquire a new client. How did you identify and then approach the client? "

An example question to assess to assess the Functional component might be:

"Please tell us about a situation where you had to get your team to put together a conference? How did you plan this and how did you delegate the tasks? "

The answer to this question might reveal some clues about the candidates organizing and delegating capability.

For the Personal category, the question might be:

"Can you provide an example of ethical behavior that you demonstrated during a situation involving one of your colleagues"

4. Experience is King

Applicants will present different various credentials in their CV and interview to impress. These will include academic qualifications, courses attended, languages spoken, certifications and so on. But remember – these are all important and need to be considered however experience is what will really matter. Unless you are deliberately looking for a freshie, relevant experience has to be at the top of your scoring sheet. There is no degree or certification or course invented yet that can substitute for real life experience.

5. Differentiating and Open Questions

Asking the following kinds of questions and assessing how applicants answer these can sometimes reveal insights about the applicant's preparation, confidence, maturity and communication skills.

"Why should we hire you? What is your greatest strength?"

"What is your greatest weakness?"

"What did you not like about your former organization?"

In the question above, we want to see how professionally and tactfully the candidate handles this question.

"What do you know about our organization?"

"Are there any questions you want to ask us?"