- Go into the interview determined to make it sharper and more effective than any previous interview you have conducted.
- Define your purpose clearly.
- Prepare properly.
- Write down your list of main questions and make sure they are mostly open questions to allow the interviewee to give you the fullest replies.
- Organize the room so that there are no distractions and you will not be disturbed.
- Arrange the furniture in such a way that you are able to maintain regular eye contact with your interviewees as well as observe their body language.
- Make your welcome friendly and put your interviewees at ease.
- Get the interview started in a brisk and businesslike manner by setting the scene, explaining the purpose and the order in which you are going to proceed.
- Give interviewees an early opportunity to start talking about subjects based on their own experience.
- Direct your body language, voice, facial expressions and gestures towards giving interviewees a sense of reassurance and trust.
- Listen with complete concentration and a mind clear of all distractions, prejudice, bias and preoccupations.
- Use encouraging verbalizations, nods of the head and phrases that motivate interviewees to give you a complete response to all your questions.
- Pick up on evasions and gaps in the interviewees' answers.
- Make interviewees work, not letting go until you are satisfied you have the full answer.
- Use probing techniques such as restatement, repetition and silence to probe for the information missing from the interviewees' accounts.
- Be polite and considerate even if you have to put pressure on the interviewees.
- Maintain a steady pace, moving towards the conclusion but at the same time allowing interviewees time to give you detailed answers.
- Handle emotional outbursts tactfully, remaining objective but understanding until they have passed.
- Take notes without distracting the interviewees or yourself.
- Finish within the time limit and make sure that interviewees leave with a favorable impression of you and your organization.
Interviewing has been described as an art, but that implies that it cannot be learnt - you either can do it or you can't.
Each interview we conduct should be a learning experience for us. We gain information not only about our interviewees, but also about ourselves. Prejudice, an inability to relate to others, lack of emotional stability, immaturity of judgment-these exist in all of us to a greater or lesser degree, but through interviewing we can learn how to overcome our weaknesses and reinforce our strengths so that, with time and experience, we become sharper, speedier and more effective.
Your judgment about interviewees is also an on-going process. Candidates employed after you have interviewed and recommended them can be judged against their future performance to see how accurate your predictions were. If, therefore, an employee turns out to be a success, you can congratulate yourself on the effectiveness of your interviewing. If, however, the employee has not come up to expectations, then, with the aid of your notes, you should identify where your judgment went awry and why the interview failed to reveal faults.
With appraisals, the goals defined and the steps agreed upon to develop or improve the skills of the appraised employee should be compared with what actually happens. Disciplinary interviews ought to lead to improved performance and it is your responsibility to check that this has, in fact, occurred.
Skills
A good, working rapport with the candidates is essential; but that does not mean that you have to go out of your way to be nice so that they will think better of you.
More important than being agreeable is being professional. They will respect you more if you are properly prepared and know precisely what you are doing than if you ooze with charm or tell jokes, and they will respond accordingly by trying to give the best of themselves.
Unskilled interviewers give themselves away by:
- trying too hard to sell themselves and the job to the candidates
- becoming too involved in the candidates' stories instead of remaining objective and unemotional
- backing off too quickly if problems arise from questions they have put to the candidates
- accepting everything the candidates tell them at face value or overlooking areas that need to be probed
- overrating the inadequate and underrating the self-assured
- Let the candidates do most of the talking - your own contribution should not be more than 20 per cent.
- Be systematic. Selection interviewing is essentially information-processing. You do not need to know everything about the candidates, only what is relevant to the job. Identify in advance the areas that need to be examined.
- Do not make too great a demand on yourself. If you try to do too many interviews in one day, you will cease to attend to what the candidates are telling you and start to anticipate what they are going to say next. This is unfair on them as well as yourself.
- Encourage and reassure candidates of your continuing interest by your manner - calm, friendly, objective; by your posture - comfortably upright in your chair, leaning forward into their reply; by your gestures - nodding your head thoughtfully from time to time; and by the way you look at them - non-threatening, interested, but not staring.
- Do not be too readily satisfied with candidates' answers. If the question is important (and all your questions should be, otherwise you are wasting your time), a full reply is in their interest as well as your own. Prompt gently but firmly by using phrases like: 'In what way?', 'Why do you say that?', 'In what circumstances?', 'Tell me more about that', 'How do you mean?'
- Take notes without distracting the candidates, but ask their permission first, then wait until the interview gets going before you start. Take down the positive as well as negative points. It is discouraging if they see you noting down only their faults.
- Identify the statements that do not ring quite true or the gaps which need to be filled, and use rephrasing, reflection, summarizing, repetition and silence until you get as close to the truth as possible, given the short time you have. Most candidates do not cheat, but many evade and more exaggerate.
- Do not condemn candidates for their faults - that is not your function. If an episode reflects poorly on them, try to see it from their point of view; but at the same time find out why they think the incident occurred, what their role was, and, most important, what they learned from it. We all make mistakes. It is what we learn from them that is the best indication of our strengths and weaknesses.
- Listen sensitively to their voices and, while listening, watch gestures, expressions and mannerisms to learn as much as you can about the candidates.
- Probe not only for failure, but also for success. Modesty sometimes prevents candidates from giving you the full story. Ask questions that show them off in the best possible light, and whether the episode reflects well or badly, put it into perspective. The complete picture is what you are after; minor details may distort it unfavorably.
