Interviewer Playbook

How many people have you interviewed over your life?

How much training have you had to interview well? I suspect this is really limited to maybe one session or some online course that you did and very little else?

To help ensure that you hire well and interview even better I have put together below an interviewer playbook. A resource and guide to help you navigate interviewing better. By interviewing better you will:

• Improve your ability to hire better

• Assess candidate better

• Drive a fairer hiring process

• Protect your company

Let’s jump into this guide to help you drive better results within your interview process.

Preparing for the interview

As an interviewer, and I have heard this from many interviewers, is that if the candidate isn’t prepared and doesn’t know anything about the role this is a red flag. Remember interviews are two way streets, the candidate is assessing you as the face of the company and whether this is the right for them. This means that you too need to prepare for the interview.

What should you prepare?

This is quite easy and if you do this you will be way ahead of other interviewers as well as drive better candidate experience, which leads to increasing the ability to convert the candidate to a hire.

Key areas to focus on:

• Review the job description and role profile requirements

• Review the candidates CV

• Prepare the interview questions

• Test your technology, we all expect the candidates to have a good connection when doing virtual interviews, yours should be too.

By reviewing these basic aspects you will have a good overview of the requirements and your role in interviewing the candidate.

Conducting the interview

Ensure that you follow the interview structure that I have outlined in other post. This will help you ensure that you have an effective structure and helps the candidate settle into the interview well.

The biggest part of running an effective interview is ensuring that you are warm, engaged and professional and your ability to get good and interesting responses from candidates will increase.

Make sure that you start the interview with some a welcome and what to expect from the interview. At the start ensure that you ease the candidate into the interview, they will likely be nervous and with nerves this will impact their responses to interview questions.

You need to ensure that you are actively listening to the candidate and their responses, this can be a challenge whilst taking interview notes if you are able too, would highly encourage you to invest in ScreenLoop that records the interview (if done remotely via Zoom). By actively listening you are demonstrating engagement to the candidate and this will enable the candidate to feel listened too, driving better responses. But on top of this you will be able to ask follow up questions much more effectively.

Assessing candidates

An often overlooked aspect for interviewers where they stumble is the ability to assess well. Part of this challenge is not having the full information to correctly assess, which results in using their own standard over the hiring managers or the role requirement. This leads to large scale challenges within the hiring process overall.

So how do you effectively assess candidates during the interview?

Here are some tips that will help you as you assess candidates:

1. Preparation is key: part of the preparation is understanding what you are assessing, so then you can look out for signs or indicators of this, if you don’t know what you are meant to assess, its going to be difficult for you to provide that hire or no hire decision.

2. Active Listening: Ensure that you are actively engaged, not just listening but engaging and asking good follow up questions throughout the interview. Pay attention to the responses to the standardised interview questions, how do they respond is this in line with the assessment criteria.

3. Responding Well: Ensure that you also asking relevant follow up questions, work through these ahead of time and make sure they are relevant, no point asking a question that the candidate has given the answer too already.

4. Evaluate: Post interview review the notes and responses and review this in line with the criteria needed for the interview, where their answers in line with a good answer? How does their response compare to what would be needed within the role? A good interviewer can effectively link these back to the scoring requirements for the role. Once all interviews have been completed ensure there is a wash-up for final review and overall decision.

This may well sound challenging and difficult to operate, there is a lot for you as the interviewer to do. But if its helpful worth remember this acronym for additional help:

This stands for:

• Criteria Definition: Know what you are assessing and what good looks like

• Active Engagement: Ensure that you are engaging and listening actively to the candidates.

• Responding: Provide good and meaningful follow up questions

• Effective decision making: Complete the feedback form and connect with interview team for an overall decision and outcome. (Ensure this is completed in a timely manner!)

Ensure that you also allocate 10-15 minutes for the candidate to ask you questions, listen to the questions they are asking as this will also help you to understand what the candidate is about or looking for within the company and next role.

Post Interview

Following the interview it is highly recommended that you complete the feedback form, ensuring you complete as much information as possible about the candidates responses to the questions (technology can be helpful) ensure that you get this as close as possible to their responses.

Based on the assessment criteria you should be scoring the candidate on what you were required to asses. Leverage the scoring methodology that you use at your company whether this is 1-5 or something else.

Once you have completed this and all interviews have been completed it is worthwhile reconnecting with the entire interview team to review the feedback and come to an overall decision.

Make sure this is done timely and quickly post the interview, delays will cause potential impact the outcome or whether the candidate takes the time to withdraw from the process.

Hopefully the above tips and guidance can give you some additional tips and insights into interviewing better. The resources I have should hopefully help you as an interviewer to become better and hire better.

• Interviewer Training Course: Looking to up skill your interview team or companies ability to hire better? Then you should come and look at my interviewer training.

• Need some content for interviewing including question banks check out my content here

• Need Interview Scorecards or a playbook for interviewing download these here

• Hiring SDRs and not sure where to advertise, post your roles here