5 Steps to Improve Your Interview Process

Hiring is one of two things: either a huge time suck if you look for and interview talent yourself, or painfully expensive if you use a recruiting company that can charge up to 30 percent of a new hire’s first year salary.

In today’s growing economy, the most talented workers have plenty of choices. Even if you don’t have the funds or resources to outbid big competitors you can still attract people who can help your business by simply following these 5 steps to improve your interview process.

  1. Decide on the steps in the interview process for the role you want to recruit. Make sure the steps are relevant to the role and will serve well to identify the best candidate for the job. You should aim for 2-3 interviews or 2 interviews and a personality test, all conducted within 4 weeks. Any longer and you will be risking losing people to competition. 
  2. Get your team aligned and properly briefed. Identify the people from your business who will participate in the interview process and decide on the areas of focus for them eg. Core competencies, technical skills, personality and team fit etc. Ensure that you only select individuals who are enthusiastic about your business and would be happy to share their positive experiences with candidates. Everyone in a team should know exactly what the new role is, what the key competencies are and what the recruitment process is. Consider using the same interviewers when recruiting for a specific job, if you want to achieve consistency in the process and quality of the feedback received.
  3. Prepare for every interview and make a good first impression on every candidate. Interviews are aimed to provide opportunity for a company to evaluate the candidate and for a candidate to assess the organisation they might be joining, so first impressions do count both ways! 
  4. Ask the right questions.

Here are some of the techniques you can use to make the interviews more effective.

Behavioral interviewing is based on theory that past behavior predetermines future behavior and this method can be very useful if used correctly. The trick is to use the “STAR” technique where the candidate is being asked questions in a way that they need to think of a Situation that occurred in the past, explain the Task that they had to complete, talk you through the Actions they took to achieve the goal or resolve the problem and finally, explain to you what the Results were.

Example questions could be:

  • Tell me about a time in the past when you had to resolve a complex issue with a client?
  • What was the issue and what did you try to achieve?
  • Explain to me, what steps did you take to rectify the situation? How effective were they?
  • What was the outcome for your firm? What feedback did you receive from your boss?

Our favourite question? At Blue Fox Recruit we conduct hundreds of interviews on a monthly basis . We like asking candidates about their biggest achievements in their career to date, something they are particularly proud of. Not only this question helps you to get a better understanding of the candidate’s aspirations, personality traits but it can also be used to set the scene for further probing questions using the STAR technique. Lou Adler has explained in his article on how this can be done http://www.inc.com/lou-adler/best-interview-question-ever.html?cid=readmore

5. Know your Unique Selling Points (USP). The last ingredient to the success of your recruitment process is to use every interview to sell your opportunity to candidates and highlight those USPs. If you can’t think of any, perhaps it’s time to create some. Flexible working hours, opportunity to work from home, international travel, training sponsorship and clear promotion policy – they can all do the trick. It’s important, though, to always give candidates realistic overview on the role, company’s prospects, future earning potential etc. In this case, they won’t walk out of the door in 3 months leaving you short staffed and having to start the recruitment process all over again.

Blue Fox Recruit are recruitment experts who offers flat fee recruitment solutions to small and medium size enterprisesin the UK. Whether you need to advertise just one role or run a campaign to make multiple hires Blue Fox Recruit will act as your trusted recruitment advisor.

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