Interviewing Employees: Finding the Best Candidate
When interviewing employees for jobs there are a few interview tips that are vital to remember. This article looks at how to interview candidates to get the very best employees. Your goal is to hire the best, those with great character. If you do, employee retention won't be a problem.
Interview With a Purpose
I have said before that you should hire character and attitude first and skills second. If you believe that to be true, then you must show up at the interview knowing the character traits you want to find as you ask each interview question. Please refer to my article with sample character based questions you can use.
How to Interview Well
Interviewing employee candidates is a two way street. There are things you must learn about the candidate from the interview questions and there are things the candidate must learn about you, your organization, and the other employees that will help them to see if this is the right fit for them too. Employee retention is the goal. It's costly to always be hiring and firing. When hiring experienced people I like to clearly explain not only what the job entails but what our business culture is, the character and attitudes we display, and take them through a typical day. Interviewing employees and knowing how to interview well is a skill and an art. One of the failures many employers make is simply going through their job interview questions and never helping the candidate to learn about the culture of the business. It has to work for both of you.
Let Your Current Employees Help!
Let the candidate interview with one of your employees in addition to yourself. They can find out whether this job will fit them by spending time with a current employee and learning about your culture. They'll often ask them questions they would never ask you. You don't want to hire someone who won't fit it. It wastes your time and theirs.
Look Twice!
Want to know how to interview better? Learn from the carpenter! You've probably heard the old carpenter's adage: measure twice, cut once. Try this in recruiting employees: interview twice, hire once! I highly recommend that during the hiring process you always give a second interview to any candidate worth considering. Never make a hiring decision on the spot at the first interview. Interviews make people nervous and while one person might perform exceptionally well during the first interview another may not and that second interview might yield entirely different results. Interviewing employees a second time often helps an employee relax and helps you see who they really are. Compare results and answers from both employee interviews to help you determine the best candidate for each position. I usually prefer to have another employee be part of the first interview as part of an initial screening process. When the qualified candidate comes back for the second interview they usually feel more comfortable and have often thought of other questions they have. Answering those questions will benefit both of you and yield a better hiring decision. Remember it's not just your interview questions that matter, it's also the candidates. Remember though, no matter how good of a job you do interviewing, you won't really know how it works out until the person is on the job working with you. I remember an employee we hired years ago. Three different people interviewed the candidate and she seemed like an outstanding choice. Her first day on the job shocked us all. It was like we must have interviewed her twin sister because the person who showed up for work was nothing like the one we interviewed!
The lesson: some people interview well and some don't. Trying to talk to prior employers of the candidate is a great way to gain insights and to avoid unpleasant surprises. Take the time and do it right. Interviewing employees is as much an art as a skill.