How to Be a Good Interviewer
It might sound obvious, but you need to seriously consider what qualifications you’re looking for, and how to assess them.
So, you’ve been asked to interview a job candidate, and you’re not sure where to start. Maybe it’s your first time on the other side of the desk, or maybe you’ve overseen hires in the past with less than desirable results. Maybe you’ve faced bad interviewers yourself, and you want to avoid making someone else suffer through that — or you want to ensure you don’t inflict inept new colleagues on your team. Here’s a primer on how to interview effectively and make the right hire.
Don’t wing it.
If you’ve ever interviewed for a job where your interviewer seemed unprepared — like they weren’t at all familiar with your resume or clearly hadn’t put much thought into the questions they asked — you know how frustrating that is for candidates. It’s a bad idea for other reasons too: namely that your chances of hiring the best person for the job plummet if you don’t put time into preparing first. If you only rely on informal, unstructured conversations, you’re much more likely to hire based on gut feel (“I just really liked that person”) than on any kind of rigorous assessment. That also introduces a lot of possibility for bias and discrimination in your process, even if unconsciously.
Get clear on your must-have qualifications.
It might sound obvious: When you’re hiring, you need to know what qualifications you’re looking for. But hiring managers often don’t do the serious reflection needed to distinguish the true must-have qualifications from those that are merely nice to have or not relevant at all. The most obvious example of this are job postings that require college degrees for work that doesn’t really require a degree at all. (Does your communications manager really need a bachelor’s degree? Or does she need great writing and social-media skills, along with a track record of getting stories placed?) But you see this with other things too, like interviewers who deduct points for shyness for jobs that don’t require an outgoing personality, or screeners who reject people over typos for jobs that require little written communication.
You should also be thoughtful about what qualities would be hard to teach in the amount of time you have available (like critical thinking, meticulousness, or initiative) and what skills are feasible for the right person to learn on the job (like expertise in a particular software).
Figure out how you’ll assess your must-have’s.
Once you have a clear idea of the essential skills, experiences, and qualities required for the job, your primary goal in an interview is to find out how well the candidate matches up with that list. That means you need to devise interview questions that really probe the candidate for the traits and experiences you’re interested in. In doing this, be sure to focus on the candidate’s actual experience, rather than hypotheticals. Don’t ask, “How do you think you’d handle X?” Instead, ask how the person has actually handled X, or situations close to it, in the past. It’s easy for candidates to come up with good answers to questions about how they think they might act. You’ll get much more useful insight if you instead delve into how they have actually operated.
Ask follow-up questions.
Once you’ve figured out what you want to ask candidates, you’ll have a starting point for questions, but it’s crucial that you don’t see that list as your complete interview script. To interview well, you’ll need to go beyond surface-level answers and explore the nitty-gritty of how a candidate thinks and operates. To do that, you’re going to need to listen to what they say and ask a lot of follow-up questions based on what you hear. For example: “X sounds like it would have been an obstacle — how did you approach that?” “Was it successful?” “What was most challenging?” “How did you navigate that?” “What happened after that?” “What would you do differently if you were doing it again?”
See candidates in action.
In addition to direct questioning, it’s crucial to create ways to see candidates in action during your hiring process. That way you’re not relying on their telling you what they can do, but are actually observing them do it. You can’t effectively assess candidates through interview questions alone; you also need to employ exercises and simulations so you can evaluate their real work.
For example, you might have applicants for communications positions write a press release for a fake event, have a would-be analyst research and summarize their findings about a piece of legislation, or ask prospective assistants to role-play a tricky situation. (It’s important that you don’t use any of this work for real unless you pay for it; it’s for assessment purposes only.)
Often in doing this, you’ll find that a person with an impressive résumé and polished interviewing skills isn’t as good a fit as they had appeared. You also might find the reverse — that a candidate performs better than you had expected them to based on their résumé.
Put people at ease.
Many — or even most — candidates are likely to be nervous, since interviews are after all high-pressure situations where applicants know they’re being judged. To the extent that you can, it’s smart to look for ways to put people at ease. You want to find out what each person will be like to work with day-to-day, which might be very different from their “interview mode.” So be warm and friendly and try to talk to them the way you would any other colleague.
Don’t ask inane questions.
The internet abounds with suggestions for silly interview questions, including things like “If you were a candy, what type would you be?” and “What’s in your Netflix queue right now?” Don’t do it. Questions that carry you so far afield won’t get you useful information, will throw a lot of candidates off, and will irritate even more of them. Keep your questions focused on your scorecard.
Know that bias is a real thing — and work to combat it.
As an interviewer, you have a responsibility to actively work to combat bias in yourself and your colleagues as you assess candidates. Most of us are drawn to candidates who remind us of ourselves or whom we’d feel comfortable getting a beer with, but this can blind you to people’s weaknesses or to other candidates’ strengths. And unsurprisingly, this is how companies end up with a staff that lacks diversity.
Being vigilant about assessing all candidates against the same list of must-haves can help mitigate some of the biases that creep into the interviewing process, but it’s also worth doing things like taking the (free) Harvard Implicit Association Tests and learning about how bias plays out even among well-intentioned interviewers. You should also be thoughtful about how your process itself might discriminate against certain candidates; for example, if you expect applicants to complete a lengthy assessment exercise over the weekend or with little notice, you might be screening out people with evening shifts, small children, or other care-giving responsibilities.
Commit to truth in advertising.
It’s natural to want to present your organization and the job you’re hiring for in the best light, but it’s crucial that candidates have a thorough and realistic understanding of what they’d be signing up for: the job, the organization, the culture, the manager, and the people. Resist any temptation to downplay less appealing aspects of the job (like long hours, tedious assignments, or difficult clients). In fact, be proactive about disclosing those things. Otherwise you’ll end up with a hire who feels misled — and who might not stick around.
Realize candidates are assessing you as much as you’re assessing them.
Some interviewers approach interviewing as if they hold all the cards and will then treat candidates in ways they’d never treat, say, clients — like by starting the meeting very late, checking email and taking calls throughout, or being dismissive or even hostile. But good candidates have options, and they’ll be assessing you right back. They’ll pay attention to things like how respectfully you treat them, whether you’re focused or distracted, how interested you are in answering their questions (and whether your answers sound thoughtful or canned), whether you can clearly describe how you’ll measure success in the role, and how they see you interact with colleagues during the hiring process. So, as you’re deciding which candidate to choose, don’t forget that they must choose you as well.
Find even more career advice from Alison Green on her website, Ask a Manager. Got a question for her? Email askaboss@nymag.com (and read our submission terms here.)
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