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Striking the right chord

Hiring decisions are crucial to every organisation. Getting the right candidates on board and doing a good job of retaining them is very important for an organisation to grow and perform effectively. Here are some ways to optimise and maximise the effectiveness of an interview so as to get an accurate assessment of the candidate.

Ice-breakers

You as an interviewer need to be more relaxed than anyone else. This approach will help ease the tension and discourage the candidate from refining facts to make them more palatable and will also help you make a better judgement of the person. Break the ice with a “tell me about yourself” question and follow it up with another one with reference to the function and title applied for.

The Taylor Group way

Taylor Group, a company in the US has an systematic screening process. It conducts a series of interviews- each interview probes a different aspect of the candidate. At the decision making stage every aspect of the candidate’s personality would have been looked into carefully.

Email queries and a telephone interview start the recruiting process. At this stage the employer checks if the employee makes a good cultural fit more than anything else. 50% of the candidates are short listed at this juncture.

A face-to-face interview follows, where the candidate is grilled on technical areas and skills. The potential weaknesses are explored and questioned.

This is followed by an on the spot skill test that not only tests the basic skills but also check for performance under pressure, and resilience to change. Before finalising the best person for the job it would be a good idea to peek into and analyse his past record. How often has he switched jobs, missing or inconsistent information etc and if required question him about it. A handwriting analysis should also be conducted at this stage, as character traits are evident in a person’s handwriting.

Place matters

An interview should be conducted in a place that is free of distractions from other employees. There should not be interruptions while conducting the interview, as the interviewer needs to focus entirely on the candidate and his responses (and so does the candidate).

The success of the interviewing process depends largely on the way the interviewers tackle it to get the right candidate on board. Last but definitely not the least the interviewer should be experienced and should have a good grasp of the human psychology and behaviour patterns. In the end one should realise that even if the person is beyond comparison in his skill but is not compatible as a person the damage possible, will be beyond repair.

Happy hunting.