Building a Winning Team – Part 3: Effective Job Interviews

Building a winning team is an intensive process. Each candidate to join your team requires the right skills, aligned ambitions, potential for growth where required and needs to be a good fit for your team’s culture. At Bramwell Partners, your outsourced HR company, we ensure the interview process runs smoothly for you and your team to get the best fit in the office. We’ve put together interview techniques for employers to reflect on when completing recruitment in their organisation.

Interview Tips for Employers

Interviewing potential new hires can be an intimidating process as it’s often difficult to evaluate a candidate in just a short period of time. Despite the difficulty, it’s important to ensure you do your homework and practice techniques for effective job interviews.

A Welcoming Environment

Interviewing applicants can be an exciting experience but creating a warm environment for them will help to make they feel relaxed and can provide their best answers for your questions. A simple gesture like providing a drink of water or having a light-hearted discussion before the interview commences, will ensure you are holding effective job interviews. A fun and friendly atmosphere is ideal to ensuring your candidate feels confident. Additionally, feeling comfortable and relaxed in their surroundings can help make the applicant’s interview experience memorable in a positive way – assisting you to becoming an employer of choice

Awareness of Time

To ensure you are providing your potential employer the best impression of yourself and your organisation, it is very important to be timely. Arriving late to the interview can be a bad look and also heighten the nerves of your candidate. To conduct effective job interviews it is also important not to rush through your questions; allow your candidate to consider what you are asking and how to appropriately address the question. We all know rushing never led to any good decisions!

If you are someone who has a busy workday filled with meetings, tasks and interviews to complete, ensure you space them out accordingly. It does not set a good tone when your candidates bump into each other between interviews. It is recommended to plan short breaks between multiple interviews to ensure you can finalise your notes and prepare yourself for the next candidate. This will enable you feel refreshed and excited for each candidate.

Open-ended Questions

Creating questions that get the right answers and level of detail you are looking for from your candidates can be a tricky process to master. One solution to this common process is to include open-ended questions. You can ask them about their career ambitions, strengths, short-term and/or long-term goals, and what they want out of their next job. Asking questions that people can be passionate in answering will result in higher engagement and shows your genuine interest in each candidate. It is recommended to provide little hints and commentary insights to help lead the conversation. Providing this support will help you get better answers and put you one step closer to finding the ideal fit for your company.

Consistency vs Tailored Interview Questions

When conducting job interviews it is always recommended to ask the same questions to all your interviewees to enable you to compare their answers. This enables you to identify the most qualified candidate more quickly. Creating a few tailored questions for each candidate based on their application and CV, is also an effective tool. These questions can be as simple as asking about their prior role and what they enjoyed about it, or what they are studying in their current university semester. Tailored questions create a lasting positive impression on your candidates.

Concluding Steps

Bring the interview to a natural end by letting the candidate know about the next steps in the interviewing process. This includes the time that you will get back to them, if you would like them to complete additional assessments (i.e., job trial, competency testing and personality profiling) and thanking them for their time to attend the interview.

A HR Consulting Team You Can Trust

At Bramwell Partners, we follow best practices when conducting interviews. Not only can HR teams assist in finding more qualified hires, but they also set up your successful applicants for success after they join your team. We hope our interview tips for employers have been insightful.  If you would like support through your recruitment process, our team of professionals will provide you comprehensive guidance on your hiring strategies.

Start building your team

If you’re interested in our HR’s interview techniques for employers, get in touch with the team at Bramwell Partners. Our professionals can provide your company with external HR support. With years of experience in HR, we can best advise you and your company. Please call us on  07 3630 5695 or get in touch online for a free consultation.