Sinta’s Comprehensive Guide For Better Candidate Interviews

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on interview best practices! In this article, we'll cover everything you need to know about interviewing candidates, including the best practices for conducting structured and collaborative candidate interviews, and the most effective candidate interview questions to ask.

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1. Interviewing Best Practices

Interviewing candidates can be a daunting task, but with the right preparation and execution, it can be an effective way to identify the best candidates for the job available. We’re going to walk you through a few techniques that we use here at Sinta when we’re hiring candidates for our vacancies.

2. Prepare ahead of time

It’s really important to prepare ahead of time, the benefits are twofold, firstly, it creates a better experience for the candidate, think about the number of times you’ve been a candidate, and the interviewer is fumbling around trying to find your resume, or they misquote your experience. Probably not the best experience for you right? Being prepared will make sure that you as an interviewer don’t look like you don’t know what you’re doing. Secondly, by reading the candidate’s resume, cover letter in advance, it helps when it comes to pre-building your interview questions. You’ll have a better understanding of the candidate and thus, you can craft or select questions that you think will help you get a better understanding of the candidate.

3. Create a structured interview process

Structured interviews are interviews where all candidates applying for the same role are being asked the same set of questions in the same order. This consistency allows you to evaluate all candidates in a fair and equitable manner. Having structured interviews is particularly important because it allows you to effectively assess specific job-related skills and experience. If you don’t structure your interviews and you’re asking different candidates different questions, there’s no way for you to calibrate when you’re reviewing and trying to score the candidate. Make sure that the questions that you select are helpful in assessing the candidate’s qualification for the job opening that’s available. However, don’t be afraid to ask follow up questions in case you need more clarity on the candidate’s initial response. Just because your interview is structured, it doesn’t mean that you cannot ask follow up questions.

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4. Collaborative interviews

Collaborative interviews involve having multiple interviewers assess the same candidate. The collaborative interviewing approach can help reduce biases and provide a more comprehensive evaluation of your candidates’ qualifications. Having multiple interviewers ensures that if there are any biases that the group can identify these and make sure that they’re removed from the interview process. Develop and use a rating system that the entire interview team can use the same system when they’re rating candidates. This will ensure that every member of the team will be evaluating candidates on an objective basis during this collaborative process.

5. Behavioural - based questions

Some also call behavioural -based questions S.T.A.R. (Situation, Task, Action, Result) questions. Behavioural - based questions ask candidates to provide examples of how they handled very specific situations they’ve encountered in the past. These types of STAR questions are effective for assessing a candidate’s problem-solving abilities, communication skills and decision-making capabilities. Since every organization has its own nuance, a behavioural-based question is a good way for you to understand how the candidate would solve very specific questions that are applicable to your firm only.

6. Coordinating feedback

Ensure that each interviewer submits their feedback as quickly as possible. Reducing time between the submission of feedback will reduce unconscious biases from creeping into the candidate evaluation process. Once the feedback has been gathered, address any discrepancies as a team. It’s important to address these discrepancies, because it ensures that all strengths or weaknesses of the candidate that may have been missed by other interviewees are addressed. Make sure that the team comes to a consensus before making a hiring decision.

Interviewing candidates is a critical part of the hiring process and ensures that you are bringing the brightest and most talented candidates into your team. It’s critical that you don’t bring candidates that aren’t the right fit onto your team. Candidates that aren’t a good fit costs a lot of resources to onboard and train. The best case scenario, it takes a long time for the candidate to integrate into your team. The worst case, all your resources are wasted and the candidate leaves your team.

Here at Sinta we believe in helping you hire better candidates faster, we’ve built a tool that adheres to our guide that you can log in and use today. Sign up here to Sinta today and see how much better you hiring process can be.

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