Is Your Interview Process Outdated? Breaking the Mold of Bad Interview Techniques

There has been a ton of discussion of late about whether or not job interviews are truly representative of a potential candidate’s skills and value to your company. Thousands of books, blogs and videos have been published coaching job seekers on how to best answer questions to land their dream jobs. As a result, companies often find that they are hiring candidates who interview well but don’t work out, while candidates who interview poorly may have had a better skill set. The only solution is to change the way we think about the interview process.

What We Should Be Focusing On Instead

Everybody knows how to write a great resume these days. You can have a program write it for you, or you can pay someone $5 on a freelance site to make it look unique, but the info is basically all the same. Instead of worrying about one-on-one Q&A sessions, companies should really be focusing on getting candidates to demonstrate their soft skills in real time. This can be done by asking the candidate to rank their soft skills in order from strengths to weaknesses to see if they can clearly communicate their needs in the workplace.

In addition, asking candidates to solve a logistics problem, either individually or in a group, can really demonstrate their leadership abilities, problem-solving capabilities, and how well they understand and communicate possible solutions. Some companies assess soft skills by having receptionists and anyone else who encounters the candidate review their interactions with the candidate before the formal interview begins. Basically, you want to see how the candidate operates when not under pressure.

Retrain Your Interviewers and HR Team

Another problem that needs to be resolved is how interviewer bias comes into play. This relates directly back to the culture of your company, and whether or not your team is really prepared to handle an infusion of diversity. Retraining your hiring team members to understand their biases is an important part of changing the outcome of final hiring decisions to better represent the needs of the company. They, too, have been coached into a single-track way of thinking of “best candidates.”

With these ideas in mind, you can completely reinvent your interview process to bring in better-suited candidates and a well-rounded work force in no time.