How to Be a Good Interviewer

Being able to interview job candidates well is an important soft skill to develop as you advance in your career.   Once you need to make hiring choices for your company, it’s worth it to invest time in developing your ability to identify the right candidates that have the right skills and culture fit for a job opening.   This is because any bad hiring mistakes cost the company money and time and could also affect your reputation.

Here are six recommend tips on how to be a good interviewer:

• Start with knowing what qualities and skills you’re looking for in a candidate. What soft skills and what hard skills are you looking for? What characteristics do you want to avoid? By the end of the interview, you should get a good enough sense to know whether to recommend her or not for next round.
• Prepare questions that will help you gauge these qualities (they could be behavioral questions, case questions, or clarification questions about their resume). I tend to do at least one of each in an interview. I prefer to do a case question as it helps me gauge how a person thinks and communicates on his/her feet and deals with unexpected issues. You can always use Google to get good sample interview questions. For the case, use something you’ve done before.
• Coordinate with fellow interviewers. You don’t have to assess all the qualities. You only have limited time. Agree with other interviewers on what you’ll assess and what they’ll assess to save time. I had seven rounds of interviews with Google once where almost every single person asks me the same question (Tell me a time where you managed a difficult person and how did you handled it?). I can see two or three people wanting to ask the same question, but all seven is too much. Clearly they didn’t communicate with each other.
• Control the pace. You’re the interviewer. If a candidate is running on too long, politely cut them off and ask your other questions. It doesn’t help you or the candidate when the candidate is running on. You have every right to control the pace and move the conversation along with what you need to assess.
• Leave time for their questions.  Leave five or 10 minutes for this. If you really run over, you can offer to arrange a follow-up call or email for questions. Offer this only if you’re really interested in the candidate. This isn’t necessary in all cases.
• Practice makes perfect and alway learn something. No one is born a good interviewer. It takes practice. The good news is there’s room for error. You’re not the only one interviewing this person. If you run out of time, you can always follow up with an email or a call if you really want to. Most importantly, learn from every interview so you know what to do or not to do in the next one you conduct.