Harvey Danger once belted, “If you’re bored, then you’re boring.”
Speaking with candidates may be all part of a recruiter’s job, but hitting the wall of interview fatigue and sticking to the same, run-of-the-mill questions and interview structure is inevitable for many recruiters who’ve been in the game for a while. Is your interview a snoozefest? It could be costing you the hire.
For the most part, candidates may be accustomed to answering a similar set of questions during an interview. Cue the rehearsed answers, an unnatural recruiter-candidate dialogue, and an interview that shares little insight about a candidate’s qualifications, experiences, expectations, or personal life.
Making a qualified candidate feel like their the sought-after hire for the open opportunity is all part of the candidate experience. Unenthused recruiters giving a halfhearted interview can communicate a disinterest in the candidate and an unhappy employee who’d much rather be anywhere else but there.
Get candidates interested in your company by showing you’re interested in hiring and learning more about them. Read on.
Set up a meeting between the candidate and a colleague.
Post-screening process, schedule time for the candidate to meet with a current employee who could be the prospective hire’s future coworker. While the meeting would allow employees to evaluate and interview the candidate, this time slot should also give interviewees a chance to learn more about the role from the perspective of a peer. Employees can share ins, outs, and day-to-day experiences of the job and answer any questions the candidate may be comfortable asking him or her, but not a hiring manager.
Have a hiring manager or CEO follow up with the candidate the day of the interview.
While recruiters are usually the initial point of contact between a prospective hire and a candidate, leave it to hiring managers or the company CEO to follow up with interviewees after meeting with them, especially if you’re hiring for upper-level management roles. It’s one way to likely reduce the time between extending an offer and onboarding a candidate. Making this move communicates the team is diligent in their follow-up and determined to hire the candidate, but not extending a hasty offer out of hiring desperation.
Try asking these questions during the interview:
“Can you name a few of your favorite things about your previous job?”
Similar to the previous question, this one gives candidates a chance to share communication and management styles that worked for them, which can give employers ideas to improve the way they lead their teams and understand candidate’s individual work techniques.
While we don’t encourage recruiters or hiring managers to either subtly or blatantly make false promises of hiring a candidate, ending an interview with a good, memorable bang gives recruiters a better chance of sticking ground in a candidate’s mind and standing out from other companies vying for the same talented hire.
“Is there anything about this role that makes you think it wouldn’t be a good fit?”
This question communicates to a candidate that the company is interested in developing their career goals and learning more about how a candidate’s skill sets and qualifications align with the role’s duties.
“So when can you start?”
This one’s a standard interview question, but ask it bluntly to get candidates excited about working with the company.
Want to learn more about improving the candidate experience? Tune into our webinar with Greenhouse, “How to Set Up Candidates for Success!” You can download it here.
