You Can Learn to Be an Effective Interviewer

Over many years as a manager, I’ve encountered a lot of folks who want to improve their skills interviewing candidates. It’s an important topic, one I discuss often with my team at Seagate. I’ve implemented a variety of interviewing systems, and I’ve found some elements that work really well for the teams I’m on.

Why interviews matter

Arguably the most important role managers play is creating teams that have world-class people capabilities. There are three key elements in that:

• Interviewing (recruiting new talent),
• Developing (coaching, job experiences, training, mentor relationships and other activities), and
• Giving performance feedback (which can occur year-round, and should also happen on a semi-annual cadence).

Effective interviewing is a critical management skill, and one that managers need to teach their teams how to do. I’ve always believed that if a team can hire GREAT people than those people will do the right thing, know how to do it, and will require a lot less management later. The time invested up-front in great interviewing saves much more time and effort later.

Philosophy of interviewing

Let’s start with a few truths about interviewing:

• The sole purpose of interviewing is to identify and hire the best people you can get. If you’re consistently getting great people and they’re performing at or above the level you hired them for, you’re probably a good interviewer. In my experience, this doesn’t occur without effort and thoughtfulness.
• Everyone can become a better interviewer. Interviewing is an experiential skill – the more you practice and think about it, the better you will get. It’s also critical to do it regularly so you keep your skills sharp.
• It’s a team activity – great groups leverage teams of interviewers that work as a cohesive unit. These teams share a common process, understand how to act together to get a more complete understanding of a candidate’s capabilities and communicate.
• Interviewing should be a privilege, not a right. In most groups, a very small % of people should be interviewers – those are usually the senior people and strongest performers. Some people hold to a view that a team should interview their manager – I don’t. I want the best interviewers in the group, who interview regularly and keep their skills sharp.
• The team leader needs to be personally involved and interviewing.

What’s in the system?

In my organization, we follow the above philosophy. We’ve also defined and developed a repeatable system. In our system, less than 20% of the team interviews candidates, and we are very careful with who gets added to the pool. Every interviewer has to go through training. Additionally, managers and senior people within the team are expected to spend time interviewing and to adjust their schedules to support interviewing. I personally interview every candidate.

Our written interview system includes things like how to write job descriptions, do phone screenings, how the interview day and the time in the interview should be structured, and examples of good and bad interview questions. Coming up with interview questions could be a blog post itself.

Whether you’re a manager or a member of a team – you absolutely can improve your interviewing abilities. And being a great interviewer can and will distinguish you and lead to greater responsibility and success.

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