Successful Interviewing and Recruitment (Creating Success)

Book Preface

Why learn to interview properly?

It almost goes without saying that having the right employees is essential for building a strong team and a competitive organisation. But when it comes to interviewing candidates, no matter how good a judge of character you are, you could be better. Most managers develop their own interview styles based on a combination of instinct and techniques picked up from when they themselves were interviewed. Bad interviewing practices get passed on from one generation of managers to the next. It seems strange that managers are happy to devise and follow careful processes when it comes to handling financial, selling, customer service, disciplinary and most other business issues. But when it comes to hiring, most managers decide instead to follow the ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ school of interviewing. However, research and practice shows that gut feelings are an incredibly unreliable way of identifying the best candidates. It is a proven fact that adopting a structured approach to interviewing is the best approach to separating most effectively the truly excellent candidates from the rest.

A good interview should have three main objectives:

1. to evaluate candidates in an accurate and fair manner in order to identify the candidate(s) who will add most value in the job;

2. to treat candidates in a professional and courteous manner so that they will want to work for your organisation;

3. to help candidates understand the nature of the job so they can decide whether they want to work for your organisation.

The rest of this chapter explains why the traditional, unstructured interview fails to meet these objectives and discusses how structured interviewing can help interviewers to get it right