Assess Better

Assessing candidates within the interview can be a really touch challenge, a lot of the time you will be trying to record what they are saying, unless you are leveraging ScreenLoop to help record the interview, you can often get out of an interview and completely forget the overall candidate.

I wanted to highlight some tips that I provide within my interviewer training course to help you assess candidates better.

1. Active Listening: Seems obvious but you’ll be surprised that many interviewers will be focussing on questions to ask or something else and not actively listening. To active listen is be listening well to understanding what the individual is saying and the meaning of the words. By active listening you can really start to think on the candidates responses and how this aligns to the role requirements.

2. Have your questions prepared: Ahead of the interview you should be thinking through what questions to ask, ideally these will be distributed ahead of time via the interview scorecards, if not worth thinking through what questions you should be asking for the role. If you are unsure connect up with your Talent Partner for some guidance.

3. Understand Scoring / Rating Criteria: Within the role there should be some key components that highlight what good looks like, what poor looks like etc. Ensure you have this close by during the interview to help you further. If you don’t know how to rate a candidate well how can you ensure your assessment is fair and accurate?!

4. Ask follow up / probing questions: The art of getting to the bottom of the candidates ability to do the role well is through ensuring that, through point 1 above, you are able to ask good pointed follow up questions to get the full picture of the candidates ability to do the role.

5. Consider Non-Verbal Cues: This is harder to pick up on within virtual interviews but when interviewing candidates in person you should be looking at their body language things like are they leaning in at the right times or coming across as disengaged compared to the words they are using.

6. Candidates Questions: Make sure you set aside some time within the interview for the candidates to ask you questions that they have. The questions they ask will guide you through what they are thinking and how they align to company mission and values. If they ask no questions at the end might be something to consider when completing your feedback.

These are some very high level aspects to be thinking about when you are assessing your candidates during the interview. To really accelerate this during the entire process you should also:

• Have a deep understanding of the role and the requirements

• Understand what makes a good candidate for this role

• Ensure that calibration across all interviewers occurs

• Make sure you have scorecards at all stages to help with assessing

• Conduct a wash-up with the interview team once interview completed

• Make sure that the scoring / rating criteria is clear and leveraged for the entire interview process

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Feel free to look at my other content to help you hire better:

1. Interviewer Training Course

2. Hire better SDRs with my SDR Job Board

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