Interviewing guidance for employers
Selecting candidates
Once you have reached the stage of considering interviews, the first thing you will need to do is decide who to interview. Before you spend time scrutinising applications, it can be a good idea to decide roughly how many people you would like to interview. Speaking to too many applicants can be time consuming, but too few and you run the risk of not considering some high-quality candidates.
It can also help to agree in advance what skills, qualifications and/or experience are must-haves for the role and your business. While in some cases a professional qualification will be essential, you may also want to prioritise candidates with customer service experience, for example.
In all cases, it’s important to ensure that you are not discriminating against candidates with protected characteristics and do not use social media profiles to learn about applicants prior to interview.
Organising interviews
When you invite candidates to an interview, there are a several things you need to organise and decide in advance.
Interviewers
The number of interviewers involved in your process is likely to depend on the size of your business. Ideally, you should involve more than one person to ensure that decisions are as unbiased as possible. It’s also a good idea ensure that the same person or people conduct each interview to allow for the best comparison of candidates.
Online vs in person
Nowadays, many job interviews are conducted online. This can offer greater flexibility for both interviewers and candidates, whereas in-person interviews allow for a tour of facilities and meeting the wider team. You may wish to offer both options to candidates, but take care not to become biased towards those who choose one option over the other.
Reasonable adjustments
By law, you must offer interview attendees reasonable adjustments to allow them to attend the interview. They may ask you to ensure that the interview location is wheelchair accessible or require a sign language interpreter, for example.
Tests
Most interviews involve a conversation element, but many involve a more practical test as well. Depending on the role, you might want to test candidates on their presentation skills or role-play a typical work scenario to assess their ability to react under pressure.
You should let candidates know in advance that there will be a test so that they can plan their time accordingly, prepare themselves and perform at their best.
Questions
For the conversation part of the interview, you will be asking candidates questions to see if they are the right fit for the role. It’s a good idea to plan these in advance to ensure that you ask everything you need, don’t ask for information already provided earlier in the application process and get a similar picture of each candidate. Interview questions can be divided into four categories:
- General – questions about the person and their background, e.g. what made you choose this as a career?
- Technical – questions to help you assess the person’s skill level, e.g. can you describe a typical session you would run?
- Behavioural – questions that allow you to understand how the person goes about their work, e.g. how do you increase participant motivation?
- Situational – questions based on hypothetical scenarios to reveal how the person manages situations, e.g. how would you deal with an upset parent?
Once you have decided on your questions, you can create a framework and score candidates against each one, allowing space for notes, too. This way, you will be able to reflect on how suitable they are without worrying about misremembering their answers.
It’s tempting to get caught up in asking lots of questions, but don’t forget that the aim is to allow the candidate to shine. In an ideal interview, the candidate will do 80% of the talking – make sure that you give them time to consider their answers and expand on points without filling awkward silences yourself.
Following up
At the end of the interview, you should invite candidates to ask questions. They need to understand if the role is right for them, and answering any queries they have honestly and clearly will show them that you are a good employer.
Once the interview is over, you should thank the candidate for their time and let them know when and how they can expect to hear back from you. Even if they are unsuccessful, it is respectful to let people know the outcome of the interview.
If you have taken notes or recordings, make sure that you store them securely and follow data protection regulations.
Hiring
Whether you have more than one interviewer or it’s just you deciding, it’s important to allow time to consider how the interviews went, discuss your options and compare candidates. When choosing, you should ensure that you assess the interviewees in a range of areas to avoid bias based on one particular memorable trait. Here are a few you might want to consider, but you should decide on your priorities depending on the role and your business needs:
- Qualifications and experience – do they have the right knowledge to perform the role well?
- Soft skills – are they good at time management, presenting or any other relevant skills?
- Enthusiasm – did they seem genuinely interested in the role and your business?
- Interpersonal skills – were they polite and professional, particularly if/when they met other team members?
- Connections – do they have any useful business connections or clients they can offer you?
If you still cannot decide, you may wish to conduct a round of second interviews. You should try to narrow down the candidates to avoid repeating your work, and switch up the questions to gain a more detailed understanding of each individual. Then, repeat the process of reviewing notes and selecting a candidate.
Once you have informed the applicants whether they have been successful, some may request feedback to help them understand what they did well and where they could improve. This is a simple task if you have organised notes and can give you a good reputation even among disappointed applicants.
Hopefully, at this point you will have found your ideal hire. Congratulations!
The next step will be onboarding your new employee and showing them the ropes in your business. For support with this stage of the process, explore our onboarding guidance.