Tips for Effective Interviewing

Recrutiment and selection is indeed a crucial process in any organization. Who you bring into the organization pretty much determines the performance of the organization and ultimately its success. As such it should not be left to chance but rather it has to be a carefully and systematically effort so that the interview process really selects the best candidate who is capacle to further the objectives of the organization in performing his function. This is especially true in an age where there so many candidates to choose from, and every one claiming they are the best candidate. This is compounded by the fact that there are so much information either on line or in print giving guides to candidates on how to give great and impressive answers during interviews. As a result you might get a great interviewee but a bad employee.Here are 7 tips that will enable you to have the best chance at getting the best candidates.

1. Ask good questions about past performance. Past performance predict future performance. Ask them to provide details about how they have performed in projects or job tasks. Prepare your questions in advance instead of going with with flow as some interviewer tend to do. When you are not prepared, you are at the mercy of the ansswers of the candidates.
2. Read books that give guides and tips on how to answer interview questions. That way you can tell when someone is just giving text book answers that has been rehearsed and sounds like giving answers they think you want to hear.
3. Ask them specific bahaviours in specific situations. For example how they would react when somebody in their team does not contribute to the team effort, or how they react to customer complaints and most importantly the outcome of their actions.
4. Get them to cite mistakes they have made in the past, the impact to their units departmentnor division and how the recovered from the situation. This will give you a clue of their future behaviour.
5. Carefully prepare the criteria for selection and ensure you formulate questions geared towards meeting them in the specific areas. This is also critical to the selection process because without a clear set of criterion, you will be shooting in the dark and definitely run a very high risk of taking the wrong candidate
6. Avoid asking general questions that invite ideal answers like "what do you plan 5 years from now?"why do you want to work for this company ?"or "what are your strengths ?". Some people have rehearsed these predictable questions that it becomes difficult for you to differentiate good candidates from the great ones. A good interview who'd be able to separate the different qualities of candidates to enable proper selection.
7. Ensure that you have a proper pre-interview meeting with the panel members so there is a clear role and understanding of expectations from the interview as well as from the candidates. You do not have to agree with other totally but during the interview do not show that you are not working as a team. An interview session actually doubles as a public relations exercise the projects the image of the company to the public. Thus proper decorum also should be maintained consistent with the image your organisations is trying to project to the public.

I have personally used these tips myself and find them very useful in getting insights about the candidates. The more I use them the better I get at asking good questions to the candidates.