Decreasing Intimidation In Your Interviewing Process

You will always want to see the best side of a candidate before you make the decision to dismiss or move onto the next process. Yet you receive hundreds of applications per job advertisement you post up. So, speed and a small-time schedule often force businesses to rush through the interview process.

Not to mention, the longer you’re without an employee, the longer the other employees have to pick up the slack and there’s a big chance of work falling behind. So when you are going to interview someone who seems to be qualified and right for the job, you want to make the entire process as calming and welcoming as possible.

Even good candidates will sometimes flop in an interview which makes you think they aren’t who they say there are. But employers have to make sure you give candidates every opportunity to show their best side.

Invitational phone call

The very first person any potential candidate will come into contact with is your recruitment team in the human resources department. However, when you have created a shortlist of candidates, you should ring up each of them to personally invite them to an interview with you. Very often candidates will be meeting their interviewer for the very first time in the meeting room itself.

How would you feel if you were trying to impress someone you just met a second ago and feel like they’re judging you? More than likely, you would compensate for the lack of contact from this person, by making up a personality of that person in your mind and trying to impress that figure in your imagination. That’s why candidates seem to put on a ‘fake’ persona when they meet interviewers. So get on the phone and invite them down to meet you.

Help them along

Candidates will be nervous when they arrive to speak with you. It’s only natural to be nervous about something that you care about and you can’t hide your true feelings. But there’s a technique to get the best out of your candidates and allowing them to reveal their strengths to you.

With the positive psychology techniques you learn in USC, you will be able to design questions and set up scenarios whereby the candidate helps themselves. You will allow them to show who they really are by highlighting the positive strengths they possess. Shining a light on their abilities, attributes and character traits but giving them enough of a push-start that they will explain more about themselves is getting the best out of the interview for both parties.

Bring something along

Candidates will often come to the interview empty-handed and try to remember everything they want to say in their minds. However, you should ask them to bring along a small portfolio of work they have done and or some examples of things they do outside of work that would help them become better at their job. 

By decreasing the tension, you’re able to get the most out of all candidates and therefore gain a much more detailed perspective on who would be the best hire.

This is a contributed post.