Do you need skills to be an interviewer?

Many people have the belief that interviewing is very simple, it’s simply turning up and asking questions, followed by submitting a recommendation of whether to hire or not.

Yet this is not the case and as an interviewer there are a number of skills that you need. The most important and one I want to explore in detail is active listening skills.

Interviewer Top Skills

Before jumping into active listening skills here are some other skills that as an interviewer you should have:

1. Active Listening skills

2. Observation skills

3. Flexibility

4. Emotional intelligence

5. Communication skills

Active Listening: Importance in interviews

Active listening is probably the most important skill as an interviewer you can learn and develop. By simply learning and developing this skill you will be able to learn and understand the candidates in more depth.

Your role is to ask the candidate the questions and listen (actively) to their response and align their responses to what a good answer looks like. The active listening aspect plays a key part in your ability to effectively assess, review and score candidates during the interview process.

Just think that if an interviewer after asking the interview question was to not listen and simply ignore the candidates response, how effective will this interview be?

Not only that your ability to recount this in conversations with hiring manager or discuss these at the wash-up conversations, is going to be difficult for you if you fail to listen effectively within the interview (unless you are using interview recording tools!).

Top Tips to Improve Your Active Listening

So how exactly do you improve your active listening skills?

Unlike other areas this is something that you will need to take time to develop and over the course of time implementing aspects will help you with your active listening skills. Might be also worth practising these outside of interviews too with family and loved ones.

Things to do:

1. Ahead of interviews ensure you are mentally prepared to actively listen. This might sound tongue in cheek, but active listening requires you to be mentally clear, it takes up a lot of your brain resource to do this well. If you are stressed about something at work ahead of an interview, this will creep into the interview overall and impact your ability to do this effectively. Get some time before to clear your mind and focus on the task in hand.

2. Do not interrupt. Once you have asked your question or the candidate is in flow, do not interrupt them with further questions or side thoughts. Make a note of these for sure and come back to them when convenient but allow the candidate to fully answer the question before saying anything else.

3. Use non-verbal communication. This is all about nodding your head and using your body as forms to agree or disagree with their thoughts. Body language plays a huge significant part in the interview process and how we overall communicate more broadly. Using this well can really be a good thing.

4. Reflect & Clarify. Periodically throughout the interview summarise what the candidate has been saying, this will help you to ensure that you understand what has been said but also demonstrates to the candidates that you have been listening to what they have been saying. This will also give the candidate the ability to amend or provide more context if they feel that what is summarised is inaccurate or not what they were trying to convey.

5. Practice. The best way to develop and improve on this skill is ensuring that you practice, leverage this skill in every day conversations to help practice and develop further. (This skill will definitely enhance your ability to build deeper and better relationships!)

Through leveraging the above tips you will develop your skills in active listening, through developing this skill you will become a better and stronger interviewer. Your ability to understand what candidates are covering, discussing and trying to get across will enhance your ability to assess and ensure that the right candidate is hired.

Active listening plays a crucial role in your ability to ensure that you assess candidates fairly and the right way.

So why not start and practice at home with your loved ones and family?

Let me know how you get on and what worked for you.

Enjoyed this content? Then make sure you check out all my content:

1. Wanting to improve the candidates you hire? Get my interviewer training course

2. I share a lot of free resources here

3. Want some guidance in training interviewers, lets connect here

Until next time, happy interviewing!