Other than thoroughly reviewing a job candidate’s past employers online, dig around on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube to see how they portray themselves. Social Networks are public domain, so don’t feel like you’re infringing on anyone’s rights. Some of the things you find may surprise you! Read on, and get more insights here too.
Formulate a list of questions related to the preferences you’ve already decided you need in a candidate. Your preparation should give you a list of areas to delve into deeper. I love making my questions right on their resume and then, once I’ve got a ton of questions written down, putting a number beside each in the order I’ll ask them to ensure I cover it all.
One-on-one interviews should always be two hours and can often go as long as four hours if you’ve really prepared and really grill the candidate, asking multiple questions around each area.
The setting for the interviews should be appropriate. Use your intuition to know whether a more or less formal atmosphere is appropriate.
The interviewer explains this stage of the process to the candidate. Build rapport with the candidate, but don’t do all of the talking. The interviewer has to stay in control of the discussion, so don’t let the candidate control the time or the questions. They’ll have their turn to ask questions later.
Always look for transition points in their job history because that’s where the most illustrative stories lie, and if a candidate shares them, you’ll begin to see more of them as a person. Moving between jobs, schools, career changes, and marriages help you get a better idea for who the candidate is as a person. Probe into the transitions –respectfully – and find out why they happened. Don’t assume all transitions are bad – ask the candidate why they made the choices they did in order to get a comprehensive picture of them as an individual.
