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Enabling for More Effective Interviewing of Candidates by Employees

Enabling for More Effective Interviewing of Candidates by EmployeesWhen interviewing candidates for a position in the organization, enable others in the organization to assist in the interviewing process by providing them some guidelines and training around effective interviewing. This is especially if you will use behavioral (or competency-based) interviewing techniques, as you will need to provide people with some background in how to interview effectively using these skills. Additionally, coordinate the interviewing process so you get the most information from the candidates being interviewed to make an intelligent decision.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s assume that you need to hire a project manager.  You have asked your operations manager, a marketing manager and a project team member to be part of the interviewing process. In order to ensure that everyone isn’t asking the same questions, you might focus the interviews as follows:

Operations manager: She will ask the candidate about the types of projects they have worked on in the past. Focusing on what challenges the project manager has encountered on those projects and how he has handled those challenges. She will also ask about successes on projects and what made those projects successful.

Marketing manager: He will ask the candidate about how effectively the project manager candidate has worked with virtual project teams. He’ll focus on what challenges the project manager has had with team members and how he has handled those challenges. He will also ask the project manager candidate how he manages roles and responsibilities when there are limited project team members to get the work done.

Project team member: He will focus on asking the candidate what he has found most challenging about managing projects overall and also how he works with team members to define processes and procedures for getting work done and managing conflicts on project teams.

You will also be interviewing the candidate (as the Human Resources manager) and will focus on whether or not the candidate is a fit for the company culture.  You have prepared questions for each of the interviewers to ask the interviewee.  You have also set up a brief time to do some role playing with another employee acting as the candidate for the position so the employees who are interviewing can practice their skills and be comfortable with the interview process.

As you can see by the above example, by taking some time to prepare the interviewers, you have a better chance of finding out the information necessary in order to help make a decision on a candidate. You can also learn more about the candidate and his/her fit with the organization by asking a variety of individuals to participate in the interview process.

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