Preparing for Hiring Potential Employees

Below please find some subjects to consider prior to conducting interviews for potential employees:

1. Develop a written Position Description and a written Document identifying the qualities/experience you seek in a candidate. Without doing such, you do not have a basis for an evaluation of any potential candidate.
2. Consider an interview a two-way street.You need to assess the candidate and to “sell” them on the organization. The latter point is important, because you want candidates to have as positive an image as possible of the organization – even if you do not hire them. “People do gossip!”
3. Create a relaxed and informal environment. Such an environment permits the candidate to be more forthcoming.
4. Avoid interruptions. Interruptions like answering the phone interfere with a smooth flowing conversation.
5. Focus on the experience, capabilities (e.g., intelligence), motivations, and attitudes of the candidate. These tend to be the most critical factors in job success.
6. Use relatively “open-ended” questions.Questions that permit a “yes” or “no” answer do not provide in-depth knowledge of the candidate, whereas “open-ended” ones can. For example, when someone is asked, “What do you like to do the most in your work?”, their answer probably will indicate what they do best.
7. Do not rush the interview process. It is much better to take your time to hire the right person than to have to terminate them in the near future and repeat the hiring process. “Do it right the first time!”
8. Have others interview the candidates and consider psychological testing. Bottom line, within reasonable time and money constraints, “the more input, the better”.
9. Meet the “significant other”, if the position is a high level one. It is amazing what you can learn from “significant others”.
10. Conduct Background Checks and contact several references. Related to references, a candidate typically provides references that will say good things about them, so the key is to obtain other references (i.e., names of other people that know the candidate) from the supplied references – or through other resources. Then you increase your chances of obtaining valid input. Obviously, you usually should avoid contacting people with whom the candidate currently works.