A good interviewer should conduct the interview in order to obtain accurate information about the person interviewed and evaluate these data to find out if they are the ideal candidate for the job offered. If you want to enhance your skills as an interviewer in the selection of personnel, you must take into account a series of principles and factors and train them to achieve more efficient interviews and therefore also reduce the personnel selection costs.
Before continuing to read this article (or later) I recommend reading the 12 interviewer errors in the selection of personnel.
Basic principles to be a good interviewer.
In job interviews, these basic principles must always be followed:
- Individualization. All the interviewed candidates are different.
- Objectivity. Avoid prejudice and stereotypes during the session.
- Self-determination. People have the right to make all kinds of decisions for themselves. Always respect the basic assertive rights of the interviewee and your own.
- Neutrality. You must conduct the same type of interview for all candidates.
- Absolute respect for the interviewee . This I think is evident.
- Professional secret. When we do an interview we are collecting personal data that must remain confidential, only third parties will be informed of the conclusions without going into more personal details. In addition, the interviewee must be informed of this fact to generate greater confidence.
How to be a good interviewer.
Once we are clear about the basic principles and objectives of the job interview, a number of factors must be taken into account that will determine the effectiveness of the interview:
- Climate of trust and motivation.
The behavior of the interviewer will directly influence the conduct of the interviewee, therefore it is crucial to take care of the details to create a good environment ( rapport ).
- Image and posture . The look and our body position are the best transmitters of emotions so we must try to flow through it while maintaining a good presence.
- Language . To gain greater confidence, we must have a language that is common to that of the interviewee so that communication is more fluid, avoiding too many technicalities and respecting speaking turns.
- Voice tone . Maintain a pleasant and cordial tone, without raising your voice too much.
- Sympathy. We should try to maintain good manners and be polite to the interviewee. Think that the most tense and nervous in general will be the candidate who faces the test. To get more accurate information, we must try to reduce this nervousness so that the responses are more coherent and not guided by the pressure of the moment. The interview can generate high levels of stress in the interviewee .
- Empathize and be assertive. With the same objective as the previous point, one should act without anxiety or aggressively in a sincere and assertive way, but without attacking the interviewee. Remember that empathizing does not have to imply an excessive emotional approach, keep your distance.
If you take these factors into account, you will make the interviewee feel more motivated and required training and will be calmer with which they will more reliably show their real skills eliminating the fears that can block them.
>> Related article: How to motivate employees? 7 basic motivations.
- Reinforce.
Once we have achieved sufficient motivation in the interviewee, we must try to keep that motivation activated so that it maintains its proactive behavior, for this we must know how to reinforce it. To reinforce the interviewee we can use some basic reinforcement techniques such as these:
- Make short expectant pauses (around 5-10 seconds). This silence will incite the interviewee to continue speaking because he knows that we will not interrupt him.
- Nodding . The person must see that we are paying attention to it, we can nod with the head moving it or say words from the summer ‘aham’ or ‘ya’, ‘how interesting’, ‘umm’ or other onomatopoeias that serve to nod what we are hearing and cause him to keep talking.
- Reflect ideas . The interviewer can paraphrase the ideas that the interviewee is hearing during the conversation, this will make him feel understood, reaffirming the interviewee’s explanation in his own words. For example: ‘as you well say, that company you are talking about is a benchmark in the sector’.
- Summarize . At the end of the interview or at the end of some phase of it, try to summarize what has been said so that the interviewee knows that everything has been understood correctly and giving him the opportunity to make some clarification if he is not So.
>> Related article: The interview of critical incidents .
- Know how to listen and ask.
Hearing is not listening, we must actively pay attention by showing interest and maintaining eye contact by developing expressions that denote understanding. Furthermore, remember that the interview is a conversation between people, which should not be understood as a unilateral questioning.
To ask, we must know the types of questions that we should ask at each moment in a more convenient way, taking into account the moment and state of mind of the interviewee and trying to avoid closed questions with dichotomous answers (yes or no). Better open-ended questions that will give us more information and make the candidate reflect.
Other questions to avoid are those that your answer is implicit in the question or are guided to a certain answer. It is useless to ask something that we already know the answer, the only thing we will achieve is to make the other person more nervous.
When we are asking, we should make a comment about the question or clarification so that the other person feels a little more comfortable because they do not understand the question correctly. In fact, when these questions are delicate, the ideal is to use impersonal questions so that the other person does not feel directly judged or attacked.
- Get the information you need.
To achieve the information we want, we can use three types of techniques: start, focus and probe.
- Home . When starting the interview and even before the other person is physically with us, we must inquire about the field of information that we want to know, for example, whether the other person is capable of solving problems effectively or in stressful situations. For this we can previously look at your CV if you have really been exposed to this type of situation by your previous work. Already in the interview we will inquire about it through open and indirect questions.
- Focus . When we are interested in certain information we can repeat questions expressing them in different ways so that the other person continues to ‘drop’ data related to our topic of interest.
- Polling . It is about delving into the same field by asking journalistic questions of the style: ‘why ?,’ when? ‘,’ How? ‘,’ Who? ‘.
- Registration and evaluation of information.
Finally, emphasize that the interviewer must be able to synthesize all the information collected objectively in order to analyze it in the absence of prejudice or preconceived ideas. The interviewer should handle this information in a flexible and not extreme way. In addition, a good interviewer must have a critical capacity and know how to contrast the information he has received with that of the rest of the job candidates.
