As a recruiter, you naturally want to attract the best professionals for your company. As soon as your job posting and your image have convinced them, the next step is the interview with potential new employees. Because here it is not only about convincing the applicants, but also the other way around. This guidebook offers you assistance for your next interviews.
Interview or conversation?
Do you know the difference between a conversation and an interview? As a recruiter, this is essential to know, since different goals are pursued depending on the form of getting to know each other and the preparations differ accordingly.
A conversation represents a casual exchange between the interlocutors. Here one would like to collect information, without being subject thereby to a fixed operational sequence structure or a goal. A conversation is based on the needs of everyone.
An interview, on the other hand, has a fixed structure as well as a precise goal to be achieved at the end. As a company, an interview is a good choice for the main interview. This is because you should collect the same information for all interviews in order to subsequently select the most suitable applicant (m/f).
The preparation
As a recruiter, you should also prepare for interviews. As a first step, ask yourself the following questions:
- Are we having a conversation or an interview?
- What medium do we use for this? (Telephone, video conference, face-to-face meeting)
- Who will be there and who will play which part?
- What is the rough schedule?
- Do all the people involved have the information they need?
Afterwards, you can go through all the documents again and possibly do a background check on social media.
Ask the right questions
In an interview, you want to learn as much as you can about a candidate and therefore you should aks the right questions. Hereby, you can either asks classical questions or do some so-called questions, to understand how candidates might react in challenging environments.
Here are some examples for questions you might want to ask:
- What tasks from your last job would you like to do without in the future?
- How do you imagine the perfect workplace?
- How did you prepare?
- What interests you most about this job / our company?
- What does success look like to you?
When selecting your questions, make sure that they are permissible. As soon as they revolve around private topics such as the state of health, opinions and views or even family planning, questions are considered impermissible in a job interview.
The interview process
The structure of an interview is a key point. Because this brings order to your interview and ensures that nothing important is forgotten. The sequence could look like this:
Start
- Welcoming the applicant
- Offer drink
- Presentation of all participants
- Reasons for the invitation to the interview
- Announce time frame and procedure
Main part
- Gather information through questions
- Present the company, benefits and the position to be filled
- Communicate expectations
- Respond to questions from the applicant
End
- Discuss further procedure
- For the interview thank
- Adoption
The follow-up
In the follow-up phase, it is important to analyze the interview in detail. Is the candidate a good fit for the job, the team and the company? Of course, you should determine exactly what your application process will look like before the actual search. If you have decided to conduct several rounds of interviews, now is the time to decide on the best applicants, invite them for the next round and prepare the upcoming interviews.
In the second interview, you can go into even more detail about the individual interested parties and also go into more technical depth. You may also ask the applicants to present themselves or to solve some tasks.
Closing words
Do you need help finding the ideal employees? Then you have come to the right place! Thanks to our experience as headhunter specialists as well as our talent database, we create the ideal basis for your search for new professionals. We look forward to hearing from you!
Source: https://www.clevis.de/ratgeber/bewerbungsgespraech-fuehren/