How to conduct an effective job interview

The virtual pile of resumes in your inbox has been shuffled, and some applicants have passed through the phone screen. Next step: personal interviews. How should you use the relatively short amount of time to get to know—and appreciate—a near stranger? How many people in your company should participate? How can you tell if a candidate will be a good fit? Finally, should you really be asking questions like, “What is your greatest weakness?”

What the experts say
As the job market improves and candidates have more options, hiring the right person for the job is becoming increasingly difficult. “The pipelines are exhausted and more and more companies are competing for the best talent,” says Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, senior advisor at global executive search firm Egon Zehnder and author of It’s not how or what, it’s who: Succeed by surrounding yourself with the best. Candidates also have more information about each company’s selection process than ever before. Career websites like Glassdoor have “taken the mystique and mystery out” of interviews, says John Sullivan, a human resources expert, professor of management at San Francisco State University, and author of 1000 Ways to Recruit Top Talent. If your organization’s interview process turns candidates away, “they’ll roll their eyes and find other opportunities,” he warns. Your job is to evaluate the candidates, but also to convince the best ones to stay. Here’s how to make the interview process work for you—and for them.

Prepare your questions
Before you meet candidates face-to-face, you need to know exactly what you’re looking for in a new employee so that you ask the right questions during the interview. Start this process by “making a list of the required attributes” for the position, suggests Fernández-Aráoz. For inspiration and guidance, Sullivan recommends looking at your top performers. What do they have in common? How are they resourceful? What did they achieve before working for your organization? What roles did they have? These answers will help you create criteria and allow you to construct appropriate questions.

Reduce stress
Candidates find job interviews stressful because of the many unknowns. What will my interviewer be like? What questions will he ask? How can I fit this appointment into my work day? And of course: What to wear? But “when people are stressed, they don’t perform as well,” says Sullivan. He recommends taking preventative steps to lower a candidate’s cortisol levels. Tell people in advance the topics you want to discuss so they can prepare. Be prepared to meet the person at a time that is convenient for him or her. And explain your organization’s dress code. Your goal is to “make them feel comfortable” so that you can have a productive, professional conversation.

Include (just a few) others
When making a big decision, it’s important to seek advice from others, so invite a few trusted colleagues to help you with the interview. “Monarchy doesn’t work. You want to have multiple checks” to make sure you’re hiring the right person, Fernandez-Araoz explains. “But on the other hand, extreme democracy is also inefficient” and can lead to a long, drawn-out process. He recommends three people interview the candidate: “the boss, the boss’s boss, and a senior HR person or recruiter.” Interviewers can also be “really important,” Sullivan adds, because they give your team members a say in who gets the job. “They’ll take more ownership of the hire and have reasons to help that person succeed,” he says.

Assess the potential
Allow two hours for the first interview, Fernandez-Araoz says. This period of time allows you to “really assess the person’s competence and potential.” Look for signs of the candidate’s “curiosity, insight, commitment and determination.” Sullivan says, “let’s assume that the person will be promoted and that someday he will become a manager. Then the question is not only can this person do the job today, but can he or she do the job a year from now when the world has changed?” Ask the candidate how he or she is learning and what he or she thinks about where your industry is going. “No one can predict the future, but you want someone who thinks about it every day,” Sullivan explains.

Ask for real solutions
Don’t waste your breath with absurd questions like: What are your weaknesses? “You might as well say, ‘Lie to me,'” says Sullivan. Instead, try to understand how the candidate will handle real work situations. After all, “How do you hire a chef? Get them to cook you a meal,” he says. Explain a problem your team is struggling with and ask the candidate to walk you through how she would solve it. Or describe a process your company uses and ask it to identify inefficiencies. Go back to your list of desired attributes, Fernandez-Araoz says. If you’re looking for an executive who will have to influence a large number of people over whom they will have no formal authority, ask, “Have you ever been in a situation where you had to convince other people who don’t report directly to you to do something ? How did you do it? And what were the consequences?”

Think “cultural fit,” but don’t get carried away
Much has been made of the importance of “cultural fit” in successful hiring. And you should look for signs that “the candidate will feel comfortable” in your organization, Fernandez-Araoz says. Consider your company’s work environment and compare it to the candidate’s orientation. Is he planning long-term or thinking short-term? Does he collaborate or prefer to work independently? But, Sullivan says, your perception of a candidate’s disposition isn’t necessarily indicative of whether they can adapt to a new culture. “People adapt,” he says. “What you really want to know is: Can they adjust?”

Sell ​​the work
If the meeting goes well and you think the candidate is worth courting, spend time in the second half of the interview selling the role and the organization. “If you focus too much on sales in the beginning, it’s hard to be objective,” says Fernández-Araoz. But once you’re confident in the candidate, “tell the person why you think he or she is a good fit,” he recommends. Keep in mind that the interview is a peer review process. “Make the process fun,” says Sullivan. Ask them if there is anyone on the team they would like to meet. The best people to sell the work are those who “live” it, he explains. “Peers give an honest picture of what the organization is like.”

Principles to remember

do:

• Reduce your candidates’ stress levels by telling them in advance the types of questions you plan to ask
• Ask behavioral and situational questions
• Sell ​​the role and the organization once you are confident in your candidate

No:

• Forget pre-interview prep—list the attributes of an ideal candidate and use them to craft relevant questions
• Include too many other colleagues in the interviews – multiple checks are good, but too many people can tire the process
• Put too much emphasis on ‘cultural fit’ – remember that people adapt

Case Study #1: Provide relevant real-life scenarios to reveal how candidates think
The majority of hiring at Four Kitchens, the web design firm in Austin, Texas, is through employee referrals. So in November, when Todd Ross Ninkirk, the company’s founder and CEO, had an opening for an account manager, he had a hunch about who should get the job. “It was someone who was a finalist for a position here years ago,” Todd says. We’ll call her Deborah. “We had her in mind, and when we opened this job, she was the first person we called.”

Although Deborah was the preferred candidate, she again went through the company’s three-step interview process. The first focuses on skills. When Four Kitchens interviews designers or developers, it usually asks applicants to provide a portfolio of work. “We ask them to tell us about their process. We don’t grill them, but we want to know how they think and we want to see their personal communication style. But for the account manager role, Todd took a slightly different approach. Before the interview, he and the company’s head of business development drew up a job description and then came up with questions based on the respective responsibilities. They started with questions like: What do you look for in a good client? What are the red flags in customer relations? How do you deal with stress?

Todd then presented Deborah with a series of redacted client emails that represented a cross-section of daily communication: some were standard requests for status updates; others involved serious contractual disputes and sharp questions. “We said, ‘Pretend you work here. Tell us how you would go about it. It put her on the spot, but honestly, it involves work.

After a successful first round, Deborah moved on to the second phase, the team interview. In this case, she met with a project manager, a designer, and two developers. “It’s an opportunity for candidates to get a sense of what it’s like to work here,” Todd says. “But the biggest reason we do it is to make sure everyone is involved in the process and feels a sense of ownership of the hire.”

The final stage was the partner interview, during which Todd asked Deborah questions about career goals and the industry. “It was also an opportunity for her to ask us tough questions about where our company was headed,” he says.

Deborah got the job and started earlier this month.

Case study #2: Make the candidate feel comfortable and sell the job
When Mimi Zhigou, executive vice president of human resources at Criteo, the French ad tech company, interviews a job candidate, she looks for signs of “intellect, open-mindedness and passion” for both the company and the role. “Technical expertise can be taught in the workplace, but you can’t teach passion, drive and creativity,” says Mimi, who is based in Silicon Valley.

About two months ago, Mimi opened a request for a new member of her team. She was particularly interested in one candidate: a man who had previously run talent operations at several leading companies in the Bay Area. We’ll call him Brian.

Before the interview, her team communicated with Brian about the questions Mimi planned to ask. “I don’t believe in ‘difficult interviews,'” she says. “If candidates perceive a hostile environment, they go into self-preservation mode.” And when Brian came in for the interview, she did everything she could to make him feel comfortable. She began by asking him questions about his hobbies and interests, and Brian told her about his recent trips to Nepal and Australia. “That told me he was open and intrigued by different cultures,” a characteristic she considered critical to the recruiting role.

Mimi then moved on to previous work experience. Her goal, she says, was “to find out what inspired him to move from one job to another.” She also asked questions based on behavior. “I wanted to see how he identified patterns and problems, how he managed difficult personalities in the past, and how he worked cross-functionally,” she says.

As the interview progressed, Mimi became more and more convinced that Brian was the right man for the job. She went from asking questions to detailing “how special this company is.” She explains, “I wanted him to walk away from the interview thinking, ‘I want to work at Criteo.’

Mimi offered Brian the job; he accepted, but later had to withdraw for personal reasons.