Recruiting new staff is a time consuming process that comes with great risks like:
- If you select the wrong person, it can be difficult to change their attitude, improve their skills or remove them from your organisation.
- Unsuccessful candidates challenging your decision to select someone else.
- Unhappy new recruits quickly resigning and forcing you to recommence the recruitment process.
What are some good interview techniques for employers?
To mitigate the risks of recruitment, start by reviewing your job description. For tips on preparing effective job descriptions, see our story here.
Having a clear job description makes candidate screening a lot simpler and ensures you are only interviewing the people who best match the role. But in the interview, you need to use 3 important interview techniques. They are:
- Ask open-ended questions based on the job description and the requirements of the role. This allows you to clearly evaluate which candidates have the requirements and experience needed. In addition, ensure you have good criteria for assessing each candidate’s response and include a clear ratings scale (e.g. 1-5 ratings) with reasons for the score accompanying each response. For example, a rating of 1 could be given if the candidate failed to answer the question or had no experience in that area. Then, should an unsuccessful candidate decide to challenge your decision, your notes will clearly demonstrate the reasons for your decision.
- Ensure your questions are free of bias (both conscious and unconscious). For example, it’s inappropriate to start a question with, You don’t look old enough to … Instead, only ask questions that will determine if the candidate is capable of performing the role. For example, if you are recruiting for a warehouse position, it may be appropriate to ask candidates if they can lift a certain weight range. This type of question is simply evaluating whether a candidate can perform the role safely and effectively.
- Explore opportunities to ask for a simple skills test for the role. For example, in manufacturing, it may be beneficial to perform a simple literacy and numeracy test as part of the interviewing process if these skills are important to your business.
Sharing the load with you
With the acquisition of Working Parents Connect, the End2end team can now offer a range of recruitment services including our do it with you service called Share the Load and our full recruitment service called The Works.
For more information or to investigate how we can help you find the best person for your role, call End2end Business Solutions on 02 8977 4002.