Becoming a Great Job Interviewer

Do you spend several hours preparing for interviews — reviewing resumes, looking over job descriptions, writing and rewriting questions until each one is as finely honed as a razor blade? Or are you the kind of interviewer who starts preparing for the interview when you hear that your candidate has arrived?

The secret to becoming a great interviewer is to spend some time preparing for your interviews. Remember how much time you spent preparing for your current job? Don't you think that you should spend as much time learning how to be on the other end of an interview?

Asking the right questions

More than anything else, the heart of the interview process is the questions that you ask and the answers that you receive in response. You get the best answers when you ask the best questions.

How do you ask great questions? According to Richard Nelson Bolles, author of the perennially popular What Color Is Your Parachute?, you can categorize all interview questions under the following:

• Why are you here? Why is this person interviewing with you today? You have just one way to find out — ask. You may be surprised at what you find.

• What can you do for us? Of course, your candidates are all going to dazzle you with their incredible personalities, experience, work ethic, and love of teamwork. However, despite what many job seekers believe, the question is not, "What can your firm do for me?" — at least not from your perspective.The question that you want an answer to is, "What can you do for us?"

• What kind of person are you? Few of your candidates will be absolute angels or demons, but don't forget that you'll spend a lot of time with the person that you hire. You want to hire someone whom you enjoy (or at least tolerate) being with during the working days that stretch before you — and the holiday parties, company picnics, and countless other events that you're expected to attend. You also want to confirm a few other minor issues: Are your candidates honest and ethical? Do they share your views in regards to work hours, responsibility, and so forth? Are they responsible and dependable?

• Can we afford you? It does you no good if you find the perfect candidate but find out at the end of the interview that you can't afford him or her. Remember that the actual wage is only part of an overall compensation package. Although you can't always offer higher wages for particularly good candidates, you may be able to offer them better benefits or a nicer office.

Interviewing dos

What should you do to prepare for your interviews? Here are some ideas:

• Review the resumes of each interviewee the morning before interviews start. Not only is it extremely poor form to wait to read your interviewees' resumes during the interview, but you miss out on the opportunity to tailor your questions to those little surprises uncovered in the resumes.

• Become intimately familiar with the job description. Telling interviewees that the position requires duties that it really doesn't is poor form. It's definitely poor form to surprise new hires with duties that you didn't tell them about in the interview.

• Draft your questions before the interview. Make a checklist of the key experience, skills, and qualities that you seek and use it to guide your questions. Of course, one of your questions may trigger other questions that you didn't anticipate. Go ahead with such questions as long as they provide you with additional insights regarding your candidate.

• Select a comfortable environment for both of you. Your interviewee will likely be uncomfortable regardless of what you do. You don'tneed to be uncomfortable, too. Make sure that the interview environment is well-ventilated, private, and protected from interruptions.

• Avoid power trips. Forget the old games of shining bright lights in your interviewees' eyes, turning up the heat, or cutting the legs off their chairs (yes, some managers still do this!) to gain an artificial advantage over your candidates. Get real — it's the twenty-first century!

Take notes. Don't rely on your memory when interviewing job candidates. If you interview more than a couple of people, you can easily forget who said what.

Although some amount of small talk is appropriate to help relax your candidates, the heart of your interviews should focus on answering the questions just listed. Above all, don't give up! Keep asking questions until you're satisfied that you have all the information you need to make your decision.

Asking certain questions during an interview can land you in major hot water. Some interviewing don'ts are merely good business practice. (Accepting an applicant's invitation for a date is probably not a good idea.) But other blunders can land you and your firm in court. Although you can ask applicants whether they are able to fulfill job functions, you cannot ask whether they are disabled. Also avoid the subjects of race, national origin, sex or sexual preference, marital status, religion or lack thereof, arrest and conviction records, height and weight, and debt history.

Ask only questions that are directly related to the candidates' ability to perform the tasks required of them — to do otherwise puts you at legal risk.

Evaluating your candidates

Wow! What a resume! What an interview! Would you be surprised to find out that this shining employee-to-be didn't really go to Yale? Or that he really wasn't the account manager on that nationwide marketing campaign? Or that his last supervisor wasn't particularly impressed with his skills?

A resume and interview are great tools, but a reference check is the best chance you have to find out whether your candidates are who they say they are before you make a hiring decision.

Checking references allows you to verify the information that your candidates provided and to gain some candid insight into who they really are and how they behave in the workplace.

• Check academic references. A surprising number of people exaggerate or outright lie when reporting their educational experience.

• Call current and former supervisors. Getting information from employers is getting harder. Many business people are rightfully afraid that they may be sued for libel or defamation of character if they say anything negative about current or former subordinates. Still, it doesn't hurt to try. You get a much better picture of your candidates if you speak directly to their current and former supervisors instead of to their firms' human resources departments.

• Check your network of associates. If you are a member of a professional association, union, or similar group of like-minded careerists, tap into the rest of the membership to get the word on your candidates. Check with the members of your professional association to see whether anyone knows anything about them.