BAJAN SUN
Bajan Sun Magazine
AUG 2014
Small Business Tips- Interview Techniques
for Effective Hiring:
By Lauren Simonds
Stop wasting time and money
hiring the wrong people. It’s time to
improve your interviewing skills.
Hiring is a risky business given that
so much of your company’s success
rides on tapping the right people for
the job. Interviewing is really more
art than science and, all-too-often,
job candidates who look good on
paper and ace the interview process
completely choke once they
actually get the job. Bad hires are
more than an inconvenience:
they’re expensive. According to
research from CareerBuilder, 41 percent of companies
say that a bad hire costs them at least $25,000.
How can you better your chances of making a good
hire? In an article on CIO Insight, Dennis McCafferty
culls interviewing tips from “The Winning Manager’s
Playbook: “6 Practices Every Manager Needs to
Succeed” (Career Press), by John Cioffi and Ken
Willig. These tips may help you and your managers to
hone your interviewing skills and improve the
chances of choosing the best people for the job.
Before you begin the interview, have candidates sit
near some of your employees for 10 or 15 minutes.
Do they interact with their potential future coworkers,
and if so, how? Their behavior can give you insight
on their personalities and show how they may or may
not fit with your office culture.
It often helps to gauge candidates’ powers of
observation and perception. If they’ve interviewed
with others in your company, ask about their
impressions of those people. Are they accurate?
Ideally, an interview should be a two-way exploration
so that both parties can determine whether the
candidate is a good fit for the job and the
company. Look for candidates who ask questions
about you to find common interests or shared values..
Remember, you can glean a lot of important insight
into how someone thinks and