Great Interview Skills
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Great interview skills are an amazing asset you can have in your arsenal of skill sets; this is because people are an important asset and you cannot afford to hire anyone less than the best!
There should be 3 components of an interview process:
• Eligibility
• Expectation Management
• Willingness
I remember someone said, “I never hire someone I haven’t interviewed.” Yes. This is how important interviews are.
If you get someone who is either not committed, lazy or has an attitude problem, you’re going through a whole lot of trouble during the person’s term in your office! That might be a period of 1-2 years or even more!
I’ve experienced that before during my term as President of my organization. It’s called: living with your mistakes!
Imagine, if you had great interview skills, you can avoid all that! 2 hours of having a proper sit-down face-to-face interview will help you thoroughly evaluate whether a person is appropriate and worthy for the job!
Three Stages of an Interview Process
Testing the Person’s Eligibility
The first stage of the interview must test the person’s eligibility for the job or assignment.
• Ask yourself, what is the requirement of the job?
• Does this person have the right skills to be able to do the job well?
• What experience does this person have that can possibly proof that he/she does have the required skills?
• What is this person’s personality type; can he/she integrate well into the corporate or organizational culture?
• How does this person respond to authority? to adversity? to challenge?
Your questions must be purposeful and focused. Through your questions, you must be able to sift out the information above.
This is to help you make a more informed decision and manage your expectations if you so choose to hire this person. And speaking of expectations, the second stage of the interview is…
Expectation Management
You must tell the person exactly what the job entails, including tasks that have to be routinely completed, projects that the person is expected to embark on, plus the quality of work that is expected of the person.
Then, seek the person’s agreement and understanding on the job description.
I cannot emphasize how important this section is; I have recruited people either without telling interviewing them or telling them about the job description. And I have regretted it.
Spend more time on specifying your job objectives as clearly and as precise as possible and articulate it well to the person that could potentially be part of your team.
You’ll find that you’ll save hours and hours of headache just by doing your homework before you choose to recruit that person.
Willingness
Lastly and most importantly, you have to try to gauge if the person is trying to get just another job to pay his bills or if the person is truly passionate about this job that he is applying for.
You don’t need robots in your organization; you need to find passionate people who are willing to put themselves on the line for an organization, and for that you need someone who’s in it not just for the money.
A simple question should do the job: Ask the person the reason he’s applying for the job and probe a little into it find out if the person is really telling the truth.
Most of the time, people will tell you that they want to learn and they’re passionate about this job they’re apply for. It takes some level of discernment to know if the person really means what he says.
Conclusion
The interview process is not just limited to the scope of your interview, but it entails a lot of other factors like non-verbal communication signals that you want to give or don’t want to give.
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