If you’re not overly comfortable carrying out job interviews, then our usual advice would be to:
- Find some decent interview training to help you fine tune your interviewing skills and build your confidence. This is actually a must if it is something that you are going to be expected to do more often. It is only fair to the candidates that this happens and that you manage to upskill to give better interviews.
- Make sure there is someone else with you to help you through the process, and cover all the bases you need to during the interview. Doing one-to-one interviews can be particularly hard when you are new to them so it will be helpful to have someone else there, to take notes and offer a second opinion and sounding board about the candidates once the interviews have concluded.
- Go armed with some pre-prepared questions, in the hope you’ll avoid some awkward and embarrassing silences. You may not manage this completely but this is something that will be a learning experience for you as much as for the job candidates.
We thought you might like a few ideas of the questions we find can help at least get a conversation going, in the hope you’ll be able to then glean some useful info about your candidates:
- Talk us through your CV. (A great starting point that allows the candidate to talk about some of the points they want to mention)
- What attracted you to the job. (Here you’ll hopefully find out why they want to work for you / your company)
- Tell us about the skills / strengths you have which would help you do this job well. (A great one for candidates who are confident about their ability)
- Tell me about your biggest achievement to date in your career. (Here you’ll hopefully hear about an example of something that relates to the job you have on offer)
- How do you see your career moving forward? (Hopefully this will include their long term career aspirations, and you’ll get a good idea whether this job could form a good part of their career progression plans)
- What are your weaknesses? (Good candidates will explain what they are, but also how they have dealt with them to improve their performance, some of the best will even use the STAR method to concoct a narrative around this)
- Have you got any questions for me? (Well, it’s still a question, and it’s a good one to bring the interview to an end on)
The types of questions we’ve listed above (apart from the last one) are ‘open questions’, and mean there shouldn’t be one-word answers. They give the interviewee the chance to extrapolate on the information that is already there and explain some more, hopefully leading to a broader discussion of their skills and abilities.
These are the best type to encourage your candidates to talk, and will help you get the useful information you can hopefully rely on to make a selection decision.
