Structured interviews help you inject objectivity and consistency into your otherwise subjective interviews. In fact, research shows that using structured interviews and an interviewing team improves our ability to make the best choice in our candidate pool.
In order to use standardized or structured interviews, you need to start by training some of your team members to be part of an interviewing team. This interviewing team will interview the people for a specific role using the same set of questions.
Here are my four tips for building an interviewing team:
1 | Diverse Tenure
Select team members who are diverse in their tenure with the company and can bring multiple “views” of the company.
2 | Interview Questions
You should train the team on the questions that are being asked and how to score the answers given by the candidates
3 | Legal Compliance
It’s important to also train the team on what is a legally compliant interview, which is very important because the company can get sued if things go awry.
4 | Improvement
Have your team give feedback amongst themselves, so they improve after every interview.
In addition to these tips on building a great interviewing team, effort needs to be put into the interview questions, the communication process to the candidate, and working with all stakeholders.
The interviewing process and all interactions with the candidate need to be GREAT because you want every person who interacts with your organization to be impressed with the organization regardless if they get an offer or not.
Recommended Reading: Your interviewing team should not be the only ones interviewing candidates for the whole company. For more information on the importance of this, check out this article from SHRM. If you want to dive into Candidate Experience and it’s importance, start with this article.
What training do you do for your interviewers?
Share your experiences in the comments below or get in touch with me for a one-on-one discussion.