Secure and take action on candidate feedback

Give candidates an easy way to provide feedback about the job interview process and their own journey. By doing so, you can find out what improvements you should make: from the screen phone interview all the way to the final interview.

By getting insights into each step of your interview process, you’ll not only set yourself apart from other businesses’ hiring processes, but also give yourself a better understanding of where you can stand to improve your approach to different types of interviews and better engage job candidates.

Tasia Duske, CEO, Museum Hack

Start out with a personal anecdote, and be human

I’ve always found that a good interview is typically a two-way street and should be a dialogue rather than an interrogation. Try it. Whether it’s an in-person interview or Zoom chat, you can put your interviewees at ease by starting the discussion off with a personal story. (As opposed to jumping right into the question-and-answer portion when you discuss job requirements.)

This can be about anything just so long as it tells them a little about you as a person. This gives them a starting point in seeing you as a person, rather than the arbiter of their fate with being hired at this company or not. It is a simple way to make the interview experience easier for the interviewee and give them a more positive impression, even if they don’t get the job.

Dragos Badea, CEO, Yarooms

Implement a behavioral interviewing approach

Focus as much as you can on behavioral interview questions, particularly during screening interviews and the initial interview with the hiring manager, to best evaluate each candidates’ work approach.

We all know the best indicator of future performance is experience. The format of behavioral interviews forces candidates to speak specifically about their experiences. This gives the interviewer a clear understanding of how they would perform in the future.

Even if a person is relatively inexperienced, you can ask them behavioral questions on their soft skills and work history to determine if they merit advancement in the process and, eventually, a job offer.

Madhurima Halder, Content Manager, Recruit CRM

Use structured interviews and scorecards

Structured job interviews might sound rigid. But, they do help prevent bias and establish fairer hiring practices. Interview scorecards give you a simple, standardized set of criteria you can easily follow as you ask questions about hard or soft skills, experience, and cultural fit.

Only essential criteria should be included on a scorecard to maximize value, while minimizing time spent during the process. Some candidates may find structured interviews impersonal, so it’s critical to explain the process — and your reasoning for using it — long before the interview takes place.

While some employers are hesitant to send out their scorecards ahead of time, it’s relatively easy to weed out the “fakes” through assessments and references. You’ll give those candidates that might not traditionally interview well the chance to prepare, calm their nerves, and bring a more authentic self to the interview.

Maximilian Wühr, Cgo and Co-founder, FINN

Include open-ended, divergent questions

Our interview process, while thorough, involves open-ended, divergent questions to assess their company fit and soft skills more effectively. These questions focus on opening discussions on workplace matters, such as communication, collaboration, and accountability.

There are no right or wrong answers at this interview stage, and we encourage candidates to speak as honestly as possible. It provides valuable insights into how they handle common issues at work. We set a more conversational tone to make the environment feel more relaxed for the candidates. It promotes a smoother two-way discussion for more genuine responses.

Grant Polachek, Head of Branding, SquadHelp

Keep things fairly simple and straightforward

We put in a lot of effort to improve our job interview processes and hire over 300 people. The two things that helped us the most were simpler job descriptions and interview surveys

A lot of companies like to publish these broad, detailed job descriptions. But, our data shows that this approach overcomplicated the process a lot. Instead, we made our job descriptions simple and direct, where almost every element was advertised as a must-have for the interview process.

This helped improve the quality of our interviews and sped up the entire process.

Surveys were an amazing addition as well, and once we started collecting essential data about our interview process, we could recognize and fill up the gaps and thoroughly improve our processes.

Michael Maximoff, Co-founder and Managing Partner, Belkins

Find out how you can streamline your interview process — and all other elements of your recruiting efforts — with our powerful yet easy-to-use applicant trackings system for small businesses.

And while doing so might do no greater harm than simply turning good candidates off, in the worst-case scenarios, you could be exposing your organization to a discrimination lawsuit by not following through with HR compliance requirements.

5 tips to avoid asking illegal interview questions

Here’s how to keep your interviews on the right side of the law.

1) Understand what constitutes illegal questions

Illegal interview questions are those that are not related to the applicant’s candidacy. These include interview questions about the candidate’s age, race, ethnicity or color, gender or sex, country of national origin or birthplace, religion, disability, marital and family status, or pregnancy.

If you ask a question that requires the candidate to reveal information on these topics without it being clearly related to the job, then You’ll be violating state and federal discrimination laws.

Examples of such questions include:

• What does your wife do for a living?
• How will you manage childcare while you work?
• Do your religious beliefs mean You’ll need time off for certain holidays?
• Are you planning on starting a family?

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has plenty of information online to help you avoid the pitfalls and ensure your interview practices and questions abide by federal laws and rules.

2) Plan and prepare your interview questions

Determining the interview questions in advance and making sure you are familiar with the candidate’s resume will help keep you on track. A structured interview process with carefully planned questions ensures that you treat all candidates equally and Don’t veer off course.

Make sure to ask each of the candidates the same job-related questions, ensuring that they are pertinent to the essential skills and qualifications that you’ve identified as necessary for the role.

Off-the-cuff questions can easily get you into trouble, especially when the interview is friendly and both parties are relaxed. To avoid this pitfall, stick to your interview plan.

3) Train your interview panelists accordingly

Any candidate who makes it past an initial HR screening will likely go on to be interviewed by line managers and leaders who Don’t necessarily have any formal experience conducting interviews.

It’s a scenario where someone could inadvertently drop in a question that breaks anti-discrimination laws without even realizing it.

As such, you need to make sure that everyone involved in the hiring process is briefed on the law, the kinds of things they should not ask, and that they are sticking to a prepared set of questions. It’s always a good idea to provide a formal training program for non-HR employees who are regularly required to sit in on interviews and to refresh that training from time to time.

4) Always keep positional relevance in mind

When you plan your interview questions, keep their relevance to the job at the forefront of your mind.

If a question has no bearing on the person’s skills, experience, or capability to perform the role, don’t ask it. Refer back to the job description to make sure you’re always relating back to the role requirements.

5) Know how to react to “volunteered” info

Sometimes a candidate will volunteer information that you would rather not know. You can’t undo this, but it’s best to move on swiftly and not make a note of it. Don’t pursue any discussion of the subject and continue with your interview plan.

When you’re making hiring decisions, you need to ensure that this info is not a factor in your selection.

Keeping the interview process fair and legal

Too often, people involved in the hiring process ask questions that are illegal and not related to ability or job performance. It may be inexperience, a genuine mistake, or wrong-headedness, but the key to keeping your interviews legal is through education and training, keeping your interviewing processes consistent, and keeping yourself up-to-date with the law.

Not only will you make better hires, but you’ll also keep your company’s strong reputation intact.

Streamline and speed up your interviewing efforts with our complete applicant tracking system for small businesses. Speak with a JazzHR rep today to get more info on our leading recruiting software.

Structured interviews are more effective than unstructured ones. Plus, they allow you to properly measure candidates against each other in an objective way so that each person receives an equal opportunity.

Taking a systematic approach to how much time you spend on each section of the interview prevents you from getting side-tracked and forces you to prioritize the most important questions.

A 60-minute interview structure example

If you’ve got an hour-long interview ahead of you, it’s important to know how to wisely spend that time. So, to offer some inspiration, here’s a sample interview structure you could implement.

Culture-add assessment: 10 minutes

This step in an interview involves assessing a candidate’s ability to add to your culture. (Notice we didn’t say “culture fit,” which isn’t the ideal angle to take with this portion of the interview).

• Put plainly, you want to know if their personal values mesh with the business’s and if their work style aligns with the way your organizations typically operates.

Questions like “What kind of environment do you work best in?” and “What kind of leadership style gets the most out of you?” should elicit thoughtful responses.

Culture-add is very important to the health of your organization, so it’s well worth spending the time to make sure you get it right.

Behavioral questions: 20 minutes

Behavioral and situational questions encourage longer answers and help you to understand more about candidates, and how they respond to different scenarios.

• You want to identify situations that involve learning from mistakes or seeking out new information, and then to ask questions that get at these ideas.

One good example is “Tell me about a time when you had difficulty with a project. What went wrong? How did you resolve it?” You want to find out how the candidate dealt with difficult situations in the past, as this is a reasonable predictor of how they might deal with them in the future.

You can also ask ethical questions in the interview, such as “what would you do if you were asked by your boss to conceal important information?”

Behavioral questions are all about delving deeper into candidates’ character, work style, and ethics. You can tell a lot about a person through their answers and, while some skills can be learned, their essential character traits are unlikely to change.

Skills and company knowledge: 20 minutes

You want to find out how a candidate will perform in the role, so you should spend this time asking them more job-specific questions. What can they contribute to the position? How do they feel they can they further the company’s mission and goals?

A well-prepared candidate will have done in-depth research on your organization. Asking questions that test their knowledge of your company’s products, services, and competitors will help you see how committed they are to really getting on board.

Company overview and candidates questions: 10 minutes

While you are interviewing the candidate, they are also assessing you and if your organization is a place they’d like to work. No matter how good they are, new hires will struggle if they are at odds with the values, mission, and environment they’ll be immersed in.

• Being clear and giving a solid company overview will help you avoid this.

So, too, will taking the time to answer any questions the candidate might have. These can be revealing in themselves, while also arming candidates with the knowledge they need to make the right decision should you offer them the role.

The pros of an systematic interview structure

You can’t conduct good interviews without having a plan and an effective structure in place.

Organizing your time wisely and making sure you dedicate the right amount to the most appropriate topics will help you identify the best candidates so that you ultimately make great hires.