Some tips on effective interviewing

Interviewing candidates is an important skill and, while you may think that relying on your “gut instinct” is best, careful planning and thought should ensure a productive and fair selection interview that tests the candidate’s ability to do the job.

You are obliged to make any reasonable adjustments that may be required to enable a disabled candidate to attend an interview and, under these circumstances, it would be lawful for you to ask pre employment health questions to ascertain if adjustments are needed.

The purpose of the interview is to satisfy you as to whether the person has the skills and abilities to do the job so your interview questions must be prepared to test these. One technique is to use competency questions, where you ask the candidate to tell you about a past experience when they had to use skills relevant to the job they are applying for. The answers given can tell you about how the candidate behaved in certain situations and the decisions they made.

As a guide, you should spend 20-30% of the time talking and the rest actively listening to the candidate. Questions should be predominantly “open” (i.e. require explanation rather than a one word response). Closed questions should only be used to control the interview.

You should use the same questions for all candidates being interviewed for the same role and keep careful notes throughout the interview so that you can refer back to them. This is particularly important when interviewing several candidates so that you can distinguish between them. You can also score each candidate on their responses to each question for comparison purposes. Additionally, these notes will provide evidence, if challenged, to show objective and fair reasons as to why a candidate was not selected for the job.

What steps can you take to ensure you recruit the right person for the job you're advertising?

The choice of who to recruit into your organisation is one of the most important you can make, if not the most important. Getting this process wrong can result in untold cost and time in sorting out the problems it can cause, such as under performance, high staff turnover, loss of service quality, discontent and sometimes disciplinary action.

On the other hand, getting it right first time means you select candidates suited to the job and the organisation, and you are more likely to see better quality and productivity as a result along with lower staff turnover and ultimately higher profitability.

First and foremost, it is important that you set out the key tasks and responsibilities of the role within a job description. Secondly, a person specification can help you identify the skills, experience and disposition of the ideal person to fulfil the role. It is extremely important to take enough time on this stage as it is critical to finding the right person for the job.

At every stage of the recruitment and selection process, care must be taken not to breach any employment laws, particularly in relation to discrimination. It is illegal to discriminate against a potential candidate on the basis of race, religion/belief, age, sex, sexual orientation or disability. Care must be taken with;

• the wording of your job advertisements;
• short listing candidates;
• the interview process;
• how you apply your selection criteria;
• requesting evidence of the right to work in the UK;
• any requirement to answer any pre-employment medical questions (except in certain circumstances)