Printer Friendly Version                                    Back to Capsules    Interviewing It's easy to overestimate our ability to interview candidates for jobs. After all, in a world of constant meetings, we all have lots of experience with the give-and-take of meetings, building rapport and trying to develop relationships. But the skills you employ in meetings are not necessarily what you want to use in job interviews – in some cases they can actually be counterproductive – and in recent years professionals have developed important insights that small businesses need to know. Interviewing is a critical element in the hiring process. It allows you to better assess how well a candidate fits the job and the workplace, and to select the most competent and productive worker possible for that particular position. These days interviews also serve to promote the company to potential recruits who may have other attractive choices for employment. What to Do in an Interview? During the interview, you will perform the following important functions: Establish rapport, collect information, guide conversation, interpret the information you hear without bias, record information and your impressions, give information to the candidate and, seek to create a favourable impression for your company. Interviewers must carefully plan their interviews, figuring out what they are trying to learn from the candidates, what interview format they will use, how many interviewers will meet with the candidate, and what types of questions they will ask. Interview Formats There are two standard interview formats, each with their own benefits. In structured interviews, candidates are asked the same set of questions, in order to give you a standardized basis for judging several candidates against each other. By contrast, an unstructured interview is the traditional conversational-style interview. You cover general areas of interest without a pre-formed set of questions. Candidates may also be interviewed by a single person, by a series of different people, or in a team interview setting with several people at once. Again, each format has different advantages. Types of Questions Three types of questions are generally asked in interviews: Behavioural-description; hypothetical or situational; and, describe-yourself questions. The behavioural-description form of interviewing, which is increasingly popular, asks candidates to describe what they did in various particular situations at past jobs, and uses their answers as indicators of how they will act in the future. Hypothetical or situational questions ask the applicants what they would do in a given situation, allowing you to gauge an applicant's reasoning abilities, creativity, judgement and thought processes. Describe-yourself questions uncover how the candidate as an individual would fit into the job and the workplace by getting the applicant to talk about himself or herself. Styles of Questions As well as those three types of questions, there are also three styles of questions you can employ: open-ended, probing, and closed. Open-ended questions focus on how a person approaches tasks, requiring full answers and providing a good opportunity for both evaluating a candidate's verbal and non-verbal language and for generating additional questions. Probing questions are used to follow-up answers to previous questions and push for greater depth or additional information. Closed-ended questions are the reverse: They allow the interviewer to get short, specific answers from the candidate, usually for the purposes of verification and clarification. As well, interviewers must give careful thought to how they will record the results of the interview (since that will help in comparing the different candidates) and the legal issues surrounding the types of questions that may be asked. It's a complicated matter, with alternate paths – and possible traps – as you seek to find the right recruits for your company. If you would like more information or assistance with Interviewing for your organization, please contact us.