How to Design A Great Interview and Ensure Effective Candidate Assessment

When crafting interviews, make sure you properly understand the role inside out before drafting questions. This involves more than just knowing the job description.

Speak with team members to understand the daily challenges, necessary skills, and what caused past employees to succeed or struggle in the position. This insight helps you target specific qualities needed for the role.

Structure Your Interview

Structured interviews are more effective in assessing candidates fairly. You don’t need to go into interviews with a script. Still, your structure should include an introduction, predetermined job-specific questions, candidate integrity and value-oriented questions, role-playing if applicable, and an opportunity for the candidate to ask questions.

When structuring your interview, you may choose a competency framework that lists the skills, characteristics, behaviors, and attitudes necessary for success in a particular role or organization. By aligning your interview questions to this framework, you link the assessment to the needs of the job and the company culture. This approach also helps reduce unconscious bias.

Integrity or values-based questions allow you to get to know a candidate beyond their work experience. Questions that enable individuals to show who they are as a person beyond the job provide a more complete picture of who they are and what their values are.

Role-playing (simulations) is a powerful tool for predicting knowledge, soft skills, and overall job performance. Create industry-specific scenarios or base examples on real interactions your employees have had. These allow you to better assess a candidate’s abilities beyond their resumes and potentially rehearsed stories of successes.

Involve Multiple Interviewers

Inviting more than one interviewer brings diverse perspectives and can help balance subjective opinions, leading to a more holistic view of the candidate.

Consider incorporating practical assessments or assignments relevant to the role to further diversify the process. These are all data points to consider in the hiring equation. These could be anything from coding tasks for developers to writing assignments for content roles to case studies for business analysts. These assessments provide concrete evidence of a candidate’s ability to perform relevant job tasks.

Remember, the interview process is also an opportunity for candidates to assess your company, so ensure their experience is positive by being respectful, punctual, and transparent throughout the process. Providing feedback, even to those not selected, can help maintain your company’s reputation as a desirable employer.

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