3 top tips for conducting job interviews
Do you have a recent opening in your company? Are you looking for a passionate individual, full of drive and brimming with intelligence to join your team? If so, then you have a full workload on your hands.
In today’s economy, highly skilled graduates are flooding out of universities in their droves and are hungry to get started in their preferred industry. On top of that, you have already experienced veterans deciding to change up their career paths who may be interested in working for your business.
Anybody can sound great on paper, but a face-to-face interview gives you the opportunity to truly gauge a candidate’s commitment and future potential. It’s a delicate dance of words which will either end with a new hire or another week of advertising. So what things should you keep in mind when conducting a new job interview?
Here are our top 3 tips that we think you should bear in mind when conducting that next big interview.
1. Make sure you’re targeting the right people
How you circulate your job spec is an important strategy that you must consider before you start taking in applications. Are you reaching the right people? Have you put up a generic, uninteresting ad with no specific requirements or overview of responsibilities?
You want to make sure that your potential talent pool is full of enthusiastic people who are full of questions and ideas. Use your connections within the industry to help put out your message.
One of the more modern ways of headhunting is to use LinkedIn to find specific individuals whom you believe fit the bill. Jobs sites such as Jobbio, jobs.ie and monster.ie are other tools to utilise when looking for your new recruit.
2. Communicate, don’t interrogate
An interview should never involve any pointed questions. It should be a formal, but relaxed conversation.
The discussion should be about the proposed role and an opportunity for you as an employer to get an idea of whether or not this is the person you want in your company.
According to Liz Ryan, CEO and founder of Human Workplace, a good interviewer would throw away the script and allow the interviewee to take charge of the session. Let them continually ask questions. A smart interviewer should be able to learn more about the candidate from the questions they ask rather than the ones they answer.
3. It’s never too early to start planning!
If you feel that an interview is going particularly well, why not try a planning exercise. Get them to plan their first month in the job. What would they do? How would they make their mark?
This should give you a pretty clear idea into their mindset and how they approach new ideas. An ideal candidate should be able to bring their past experiences into a new environment and use them to help solve any issues within your company.
If they’re able to confidently produce a viable plan, one which you would even be happy to implement immediately, then you know you’re onto something good!