As you begin searching for great employees to join your team or company, you need to think about the interviews you have to conduct. While knowing the right and wrong questions to ask is important, it’s also important to know how to ask those questions. Interview questions can be misleading, misinterpreted, and you give candidates false hope if you aren’t careful.
While in an interview, you as an employer need to pay special attention to your body language, word choice, and even your tone when asking questions. To help you out, here are five tips on asking interview questions:
1. Pay Attention to Tone
You’re probably a really busy person. You need to fill the position quickly. Maybe you get straight to the point with your questions. Maybe you ask broad questions. No matter what questions you’re asking, you need to pay attention to the tone you’re using when asking them. If you ask them quickly or passively, a candidate could get the impression that you don’t care about them or filling the job. Remember, you’re making a first impression with each candidate, so it’s important that you have a professional tone during the interview.
2. Prepare Your Questions
One of the worst things you can do for the candidate’s experience is to not be prepared. Avoiding this requires not only having questions ready for candidates, but reviewing their resumes and cover letters so that you can ask more specific and targeted questions. Remember, you’re trying to figure out if this person can do the job and also fit in with your company culture.
3. Have a Conversation
Since you’re trying to get to know candidates, it helps to have a conversation during the interview. While there is specific information you need to learn from the interview, it allows them to talk about their experiences, passions, and their ideal job and work setting. Having a more natural conversation with candidates will help them be more relaxed and willing to answer all of your questions.
4. Listen and Respond
While a conversation is a key element to every successful interview, you also need to make sure you are listening to what candidates are saying and respond to that. You have prepared questions, but you also need to ask follow-up questions to bounce off what the candidates are saying. Your interview may end up going a different way than you expected, but that can be a really great thing because you could end up finding the perfect candidate. Listening to candidates will help you learn about them and their experiences as employees.
5. Be Honest
During your interview, it may be tempting to talking about only the exciting or fascinating aspects of the position, but you need to be upfront and honest about everything the position entails. It can turn off recent hires if you tell them one thing during an interview and expect something completely different from them as an employee. Be honest with your expectations and be honest with the job requirements. Remember, you could be talking to someone you are going to hire and work with.
Do you have any tips on asking interview questions? How do you handle interviews? Leave your stories and suggestions in the comments section below!