The Ultimate Guide to Conducting Interviews: Boost Your Hiring Success Rate

As a hiring manager, you know the weight of responsibility that comes with each interview. You're not just filling a position; you're shaping the future of your team and company. But let's be honest - conducting compelling interviews is more complicated than it looks. You've probably felt that sinking feeling when a seemingly perfect candidate turns out to be a poor fit or worse, when top talent slips through your fingers because your interview process didn't showcase your company's true potential.

The consequences of ineffective interviews can be devastating. You might find yourself dealing with high turnover rates, watching productivity plummet as mismatched hires struggle to keep up, or facing the frustration of restarting the hiring process all over again. The pressure to make the right decision can be overwhelming, especially when you know a single bad hire can disrupt team dynamics and set projects back by months.

But here's the good news: it doesn't have to be this way. Imagine the relief of confidently extending offers to candidates you know will thrive in your organisation and the satisfaction of watching your new hires seamlessly integrate and contribute to your team's success.

In this guide, we'll walk you through proven strategies to elevate your interview game. These strategies will help you identify top talent, reduce hiring mistakes, and create an interview experience that assesses candidates accurately and sells your company as an employer of choice. Let's get into it!

Why are compelling interviews important?

In today's competitive job market, identifying the right talent is critical for any organisation's success. The job interview is a pivotal point in recruitment, allowing a company to predict a candidate's future performance.

However, interviews are only as effective as how and when they are conducted. When they occur at the right place in the process (further down, after initial screenings) and are performed consistently and structured, interviews can give a company the confidence to move forward with its selection decision.

Methods to prepare for an interview

Preparing for an interview isn't just a box to tick - it's the foundation for wise hiring decisions that can shape your company's future. As an employer, preparing thoroughly allows you to identify top talent, showcase your company culture, and ensure a fair and efficient process. This preparation begins with a crucial first step: deciding what you are looking for in a candidate.

Decide what you are looking for in a candidate:

Before conducting interviews, it is crucial to establish a clear vision of your ideal candidate. This profile serves as a roadmap for your recruitment process, guiding you from creating the job description to the final selection. When developing an idea candidate profile, consider the following process:

Define Core Responsibilities

Begin by outlining the role's day-to-day tasks and long-term objectives. Consult with team members in similar positions or their managers to gain insights into the critical requirements for success. Additionally, researching comparable roles in competitor companies can provide valuable perspectives on industry standards and expectations.

Align with Organisational Culture

Look beyond technical qualifications and consider how the ideal candidate fits your company's culture and vision. Reflect on the following questions:

• Based on your company culture, what type of person would be successful in the role you are hiring for?
• What personality traits complement your organisational values?
• How can the right candidate contribute to achieving company goals?
• What characteristics define successful employees in your current team?

Learn from top performers:

Analyse the attributes of your most successful employees. Identify common traits, skills, and behaviours that contribute to their excellence. This will help you define what you expect from your candidates and determine some of the commonalities, particularly when it comes to personality and soft skills.

Define Hard and Soft Skills:

Hard Skills are considered teachable abilities like experience with certain software or in a specific industry.

What is clear is that for any role, you will have a large set of relevant hard skills. However, you must refine this list into something usable for a candidate profile, job ads, interviews, and the entire hiring process.

To do this, you will need to divide these skills into separate sections, which include

• What you need and can't train
• What you need but can train
• What you want
• What isn't necessary

Anything that cannot be trained and is a skill you need to complete the job should go on the "must-have" list. This is often the most crucial element and the bulk of the candidate profile.

Finally, review the "must have" hard skills and remove any that are unnecessary and can be "nice to have" attributes.

On the other hand, soft skills are the personal characteristics that help individuals to be more successful at work. For example, leadership, communication, and problem-solving are all considered soft skills.

Once again, like hard skills, you must have a list of soft skills that will influence hiring decisions. Whilst they may be essential and relevant to the role, being able to assess them is not easy—and much harder to train if a candidate lacks them.

Because they are harder to identify and train, aim to be selective about "must-have" soft skills.

Be realistic:

Ensure you and your hiring team know that it is unlikely to find a candidate that matches the candidate profile exactly. Remember you are looking for someone who embodies the profile's spirit and matches most of the line items, not necessarily every single one.

Decide on an interview format:

We all like to think we're unbiased when it comes to hiring. But when you break it down, many hiring decisions are based on criteria that differ from how well the candidate will do in the role.

Studies show that 39% of interviews are rejected based on the candidate's confidence level, tone, or smile. You might not even realise you are being biased, but if you are short of committing to blind hiring, how can you solve this issue?

Changing the way you interview can help.

What are unstructured interviews?

Unstructured interviews are pretty much what they say. You let the interview unfold like a conversation, and though you might have general topics you want to cover, you don't have a specific set of questions written down.

Unstructured interviews offer flexibility and a conversational approach. While they can reveal unexpected insights about candidates, they come with significant drawbacks:

• Lack of consistency across candidates
• Increased potential for unconscious bias
• Difficulty in making objective comparisons
• Risk of discussing legally sensitive topics.

What are structured interviews:

Most people are familiar with structured interviews, which have a formal atmosphere, prepared questions, and lots of discussion about the skill requirements for the job and how the candidate plans to meet your company's needs and expectations.

They involve:

• Predetermined questions asked in a specific order
• Consistent evaluation criteria for each candidate
• Reduced influence of personal bias
• Better legal compliance and defensibility of hiring decisions.

To implement structured interviews effectively:

1. Develop a comprehensive set of questions based on your candidate profile
2. Create a standardised rating scale for evaluating responses
3. Train interviewers to follow the structured format consistently
4. Document responses objectively during the interview

A structured interview process levels the playing field so you can evaluate each candidate on the same traits, increasing the odds that you will pick the closest match to your ideal candidate profile. A thoroughly planned interview will also help you keep on track, focusing on the details you need to know to decide.

A fully structured interview is your best protection for reducing bias and ensuring an objective hiring decision. However, it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing decision. You can use an overall structured approach – predesigned questions, order and ranking scale – and incorporate un-prepared questions. You might allow some free-form conversation at the beginning or end of the interview or allow yourself one or two follow-up questions that aren't entirely on task.

Combat your bias

Interviewing bias refers to the preconceived ideas that can influence the evaluation of candidates during job interviews. An interviewer's perception of these candidates may be conscious, meaning they are aware of their thought process, or unconscious, meaning they are unaware of them. This bias can result in

• Poor hiring decisions
• Increased employee turnover
• Reduced workforce diversity
• Hindered inclusivity effort

Ways to avoid interviewer bias in your selection process

1. Use standardised questions: For each job, have a set of questions you ask each candidate in the same order. This way, you don't veer into similar-to-me bias or inconsistency in questioning.
2. Take notes as you go: Instead of waiting until the candidate leaves to write down your impressions (which can tend towards similar-to-me bias, stereotyping, and halo/horn bias), write down your impressions as you go. Preparing a standardised sheet with room for answers can keep things accurate and is critical to ensuring a structured process.
3. Grade candidates on a rubric: Before you begin the interview process, determine which skills are essential and look at those skills individually. This will help you avoid stereotyping, first impression bias, contrast effect, etc.
4. Require anonymous test assignments: These should be short and non-actual work that benefits the business. Every candidate should receive the same assignment – whether writing a piece of code, analysing a data set, etc., and judging the work product without identifying candidates. This will help eliminate all biases if the work is directly related to the job's needs.
5. Have multiple people interview the candidate: Each interviewer should have questions about their expertise and job requirements. The candidate may feel they are answering the same questions with different interviewers, but the idea is to get a clear picture while reducing bias.
6. Don't use your gut: Sometimes, you may like a candidate or feel that this person is best. Using the above methods to evaluate candidates will give you a quantifiable answer for the best candidate. Your gut will often use your own biases disguised as intuition.

Develop a list of purposeful questions.

Before you meet candidates face-to-face, you need to determine precisely what you are looking for in a new hire so that you can ask the right questions during the interview.

Behavioural Questions:

Behavioural questions aim to uncover how candidates have handled real-world situations in the past. They can show you how the candidate approaches specific duties or challenges so you can predict how they are likely to act in scenarios relevant to the position. Some behavioural questions you can ask include:

1. Can you give me an example of an ambitious goal you achieved thanks to a new or innovative approach you used?
2. Tell me about a time when you made a significant mistake that impacted your team. How did you handle it?
3. Have you had to manage several important projects under tight time constraints in the past? If so, how did you organise your work?
4. Share an example of how you were able to motivate a coworker and help them improve their performance.
5. Tell me about a time when you had to use your negotiation skills to get everyone on the same page. How did you approach the situation, and what results did you achieve?

When evaluating responses, look for concrete examples, the candidate's thought process, and lessons learned from the experience. Click here to view other examples of behavioural questions to ask candidates.

Situational Questions:

Situational questions present hypothetical scenarios to candidates, challenging them to describe how they would handle specific work-related situations, with the purpose of assessing their problem-solving abilities, decision-making abilities, and potential job performance in real-time, even if they lack direct experience in certain areas. Some example's of situational questions include:

• You realise your manager has made a big mistake on a substantial project. What would you do?
• What would you do if a team member wasn't pulling their weight on a group project?
• Image a key client who is dissatisfied with our product. How would you approach resolving their concerns?

Please pay attention to the candidate's reasoning and the practicality of their proposed solutions. Click here to view more examples of situational questions you can ask.

Skill Based Questions:

Skill-based questions uncover whether an individual's skillset matches the organisation's requirements. These questions require candidates to discuss their existing skills and those they want to develop.

When developing your skill-based questions, refer to your candidate profile, specifically the skill section. This will ensure that your questions align with the role's specific requirements.

Prioritise key skills: When crafting these questions, focus primarily on the "must-have skills", especially critical hard and soft skills that cannot be trained on the job.

Hard Skill Questions:

• Can you walk me through your experience with (Specific software or tool)
• How would you approach (specific task relevant to the role)?
• What is one professional or technical skill you would like to develop?
• What tools do you typically need to diagnose problems in your field?
• How would you allocate business funds appropriately?

Soft Skill questions:

• Communication: Describe when you had to explain a complex concept to someone without a background.
• Adaptability: Tell me about a situation in which you had to adjust quickly to a significant change in your work environment.
• Leadership: Can you share an example of how you motivated a team to achieve a challenging goal?
• Problem-solving: Describe a creative solution you developed to address a recurring issue in your previous role.
• Teamwork: How do you typically handle disagreements within a team?

Skill Development Potential:

While focusing on existing skills, also explore a candidate's capacity for growth.

• What is a skill you have recently acquired or improved? How did you approach learning it?
• In what areas do you need further development to excel in this role?

Click here to view more examples of skill-based questions you can ask.

Cultural/Value Fit Questions:

Beyond questions that help determine whether a candidate fits the role, it is essential to consider company culture.

According to a 2021 PwC survey, 66% of C-Suite executives think culture is more critical than organisational performance. In fact, 71% of leadership respondents report that their culture helps make change initiatives happen.

However, we know that interviewing for cultural fit needs to be updated. So, how do you find the right questions to ask in an interview about culture?

Hiring for cultural add VS cultural fit:

First, let's understand the difference between hiring for cultural fit versus cultural add:

• Cultural Fit: We define cultural fit as sharing the same behaviours, values, interests, and work preferences. But the key part of this phrase is the term "Fit"." To fit into a culture, a person must have some sort of homophily. In short, cultural fit is about looking for someone based on their similarities to the group.
• Cultural Add: A cultural add is someone who brings diverse experiences, perspectives, and ideas to a workplace. This perspective embodies the idea that a culture enhances and adds to the current company culture. A culture shares certain core behaviours and values necessary to the group but shows and interprets them differently. A cultural add empowers growth for the team and individuals.

Hiring for cultural fit could mean encouraging bias (Especially unconscious bias). Similarly-minded and homogenous groups can encourage groupthink, which can spiral into toxicity or even hostility in the workplace.

However, hiring for cultural ads encourages diversity, which is better for your employees and business. Diverse teams and teams with diverse perspectives and approaches have more energy and potential for productive friction. They work more intelligently and are better equipped to solve complex problems.

Culture-Add Interview Question Examples:

1. In what ways do your colleagues benefit from working with you as opposed to one of your coworkers??
2. Tell me about a time when understanding someone else's perspective helped you accomplish a goal or resolve a conflict.?
3. From your perspective, how can we improve our culture or values? What values would you bring to our organisation??
4. How do you measure success at work? How does a successful day at work look for you??
5. Tell us about a time you received feedback from a manager or colleague. How did you react? What lessons did you learn??
6. How do you like to be managed? What characteristics do you look for in a leader??
7. Based on your knowledge of the role, do you have any recommendations or ideas for improving??
8. How do you typically approach working through a challenging problem? What's your approach to teamwork and collaboration??
9. What fundamental values or behaviours are most important to you in a company?
10. What attracts you to the company values? How do our core values align with your personal value system??

Click here to view more examples of culture-add questions you can ask during the interview.

Motivation-based questions:

These questions seek to uncover the drive and motivation behind an applicant's application. This can reveal a candidate's reasons for applying and whether their values align with the organisation's.

What are your biggest aspirations in life – work or otherwise?

• Please walk me through your career from when you left high school. Why did you study what you did or take the path you did?
• What do you enjoy most/least about your current role?
• What aspects of this position do you find most appealing?
• Describe your ideal work environment. What factors contribute to your productivity and job satisfaction?

Look for genuine enthusiasm and values that align with your company's mission and culture.

Click here to view more examples of culture-add questions you can ask during the interview.

Want to keep reading?

Want to dive deeper into mastering the art of conducting interviews? There's so much more to explore!

Click the link below to access our full guide and discover:

? How to ensure a smooth candidate process

? Expert tips for structuring your interviews effectively

? Techniques to sell your company and position to top talent

And More! Whether you're a seasoned interviewer looking to refine your skills or new to the hiring game, our comprehensive guide has something valuable for everyone. Don't let another great candidate slip through your fingers!

https://www.austcorpexecutive.com.au/blog/2024/10/ultimate-guide-to-conducting-interviews