Brilliant Leader: Interview

The key technique to be used for recruiting the candidate should be the Communication funnel. It is important that you put the candidate at ease and start out with some general, top level questioning before looking to drill down further. The objective of recruitment interviewing is to discover the truth about the candidate and then compare the truth to your person specifications.

Competency based questions should certainly be part of the interviewing mix but additionally your should look at using factual questions about the candidate's career and hypothetical scenario questions. The use of active listening combined with good quality probing and summary questions then compete mix.

Competency based Questions :

Should use there to explore existing ability based on the candidate's previous experience. There are two problems with this type of questions. Firstly, a candidate can make up or exaggerate their answers and perhaps, more importantly, they might not be able to think of a relevant example of the spur of the moment, even though a good one exists.

Factual Questions :

Why did you leave this job ? This is factual question. Will you be able to travel abroad at short notice ? What motivates or demotivates you ? As with any questions you are not guaranteed a factual /truthful answer but, nonetheless, they are useful part of the interview mix as they provide specific information about the person who might end up in your team.

Hypothetical Situation questions :

These questions start by presenting the candidates with a hypothetical situation and then challenge them to suggest which course of action they would take and why. Their responses to these questions will give you an insight into their knowledge, application, awareness, mindset and values. They tell you a lot about the person and their potential.

Probing Questions:

While competency, factual and hypothetical questions provide you with good ways of starting a communication funnel, the key to getting at the truth lies in the quality of the probing questions that follow. There cannot be pre-planned. They are questions that take the answer you have been given and dig dipper until you are satisfied that you have gone as far as you can . The end of a funnel should mean that you can place a tick or a cross against one or more of the criteria on your person specification. An unsatisfactory conclusion is when you are left with question marks. This means that at some point, either later in this interview, via a test or in the second interview, you need to explore this area further to discover the truth.

Summary Questions :

These should be used throughout the interview. Their primary use is to check your understanding. However, they are also good for stopping the candidate from going off at the tangent and, possibly, to highlight an inconsistency or problem with the answer they have given.

Leading Questions:

There are questions that include the answers you are looking for within them. For example, The important thing with negotiating is to only ever give concession away if you really have to, wouldnt you agree ? I would generally say that leading questions should be avoided because they invariable tell you very little about the person or their ability to do the job. The exception is perhaps if you are recruiting and expert and you really want to test their expertise by leading them down the wrong path to see if they challenge your assertions but, even in this instances leading questions should be used sparingly.

The Final Element of recruiting the right people is to select key ingredients for the role based on personality, character traits and disposition. This is often the difference between recruiting good people and great people. Brilliant leader do not settle for second best.