52 Recruitment
INTERVIEW INSIGHTS
Robert Kenward , fitability ® recruiter at You Search & Select , shares four simple steps for interviewing
want to cover interviews this month because I ’ m pretty sure that no one likes conducting them .
Everyone approaches an interview like a meeting : “ I ’ m doing an interview tomorrow at three o ’ clock . I ’ ll read the CV at lunchtime , and then I ’ ll just head on into the interview for a chat , see if I like them and then decide …”
But these are really big decisions being made ; your choices could change someone ’ s career path , and of course , you could also damage or hugely benefit your business .
Several irrelevant things could influence your decisions ; you could be hung over ( it happens …) or be in the middle of a bad morning , or conversely you could have just come from a winning pitch , and everything is just amazing .
With recruitment on the whole , our industry is too focused on the ‘ fluffy ’ parts of things ; people rely on their gut instinct to make really important decisions , they employ people they get along with , or take on a person because it ’ s a mate of someone they already work with : “ Jeff is great , so his friend must be great too …” That ’ s not how you should make business-critical decisions .
Pretty much no one in our industry is a trained interviewer ; people might have interviewed before , and maybe even done it a
Robert Kenward
“ These are really big decisions and your choices could change someone ’ s career path and also damage or hugely benefit your business .” few times , but this doesn ’ t automatically make them any good at it . I find that it ’ s usually the more senior people who think they are great . But honestly , they aren ’ t any good either .
I think bad interviewing practices are linked to the fact that hardly anyone can give detailed feedback to unsuccessful candidates ; you can ’ t tell them exactly why they didn ’ t get the job if you don ’ t have an idea yourself .
My pet peeve is companies who tell candidates that they came a close second . An unsuccessful candidate should be entitled to know why , so it ’ s only fair to tell them what they were missing .
If only everyone treated an interview as a pitch meeting because you ’ d never go into a pitch unprepared . Everyone could be much better at interviewing if they took it seriously , did a little bit of prep and had a plan .
Here are my four simple steps for interviewing :
1 . Consider the three key attributes you are assessing : personality and the person , experience and skills , and future growth . Then consider how important each of these are to the position . For example , you may decide that this role is 60 % experience and skills , 30 % personality , their relationships and the human touch , and 10 % future growth .
2 . You ’ ve now got a weighting matrix , and you can divide your questions up according to these percentages ; if you have ten questions then six would be www . conference-news . co . uk