Effective Interview Techniques to Help You Hire the Right Candidate

Hiring the right people is a major factor in your company’s success. After all, good business processes are implemented by good and efficient employees. While interviews can say a lot about a potential employee, how do you really know what they’re thinking? What’s behind their seemingly professional demeanor and subtle nods during your conversation?

Many employers and recruiters are aware that not everyone lives up to the promise of their resume. Experience and credentials can be deceiving, and you don’t want to waste your time sitting in your Washington DC office suite speaking to candidates that are not the right fit. So here are a few effective interview techniques and tools you can use in choosing the right candidate for the job.

Formal Interviews
This is the most common type of interview method used, but its underlying benefits cannot be overemphasized. When employers or recruiters discuss in a formal manner, requiring applicants to act in an equally formal manner, you can immediately assess their level of experience and comfort in dealing with formal situations such as board room presentations and selling to clients.

To prepare for formal interviews, you can prepare yourself for salary discussions by using free salary calculators. With these tools, you can analyze if what they’re expecting is close to the market rate. Using multiple criteria like job title, country, state, city, years of experience, qualifications, and more, you can calculate the proper salary to offer.

This technique and tool helps make this part of the interview process more controlled by the employer since you’ll have a better handle on the going market rate for a particular job type.

Free-Flowing Interviews
This interview method is conversational, unscripted, and casual. It’s your choice whether you want to ask about the applicant’s previous work experience or how they feel about their former boss or supervisor and company as a whole. The goal of this interview technique is to allow the applicant to feel comfortable and ideally encourage both the interviewer and interviewee to have a more meaningful exchange of questions and their answers.

STAR
Structuring the prospective employee’s responses is a good interview method you can use to get to detailed answers to interview questions.  For example, after asking about an actual situation or a hypothetical one, have the interviewees arrange their answer in the following format:

• Situation
• Task
• Activity
• Result

When used correctly, the STAR method will come across as a seamless and well-articulated reply that can help you find out how prospective workers make judgments and decisions.

These are a few techniques that can help you to hire the right workers for your open positions. In interviewing prospective employees, your DC or Metro area office space says a lot about you. Contact Metro Offices to learn about available DC office space and executive suites in Washington, DC along with private and shared offices and virtual office solutions, we offer them all. Call us at (703) 871-5208 to learn how we can be of service.

Kathlene Buchanan

As the founder of Metro Offices, she has championed workspace innovation since 1989, inspired by the creativity and drive of their 30,000+ clients. Woman-owned and locally focused, the company tailors its spaces to meet the unique needs of every business.

tags: Blog | Helpful Tips