How to Save an Interview Gone Wrong

July 7, 2014 at 6:00 AM by Kathleen de Lara

interviewing candidatesThe uncomfortable silence. Darting eyes. The ums, uhs, and so yeahs.

Unless your title is Chief Interviewer, it’s common for recruiters to be great at finding and engaging top talent, but to fall flat on the next step of the candidate experience: The interview.

Whether or not you’re a seasoned pro at chatting it up with a candidate, most recruiters eventually meet the dreaded interview fatigue. Here’s how to fix that.

You don’t sense chemistry between you and the candidate.

It was a match in resume heaven, and your gut reaction was to send a message to this candidate as soon as possible to get them in the door for an interview. But now that you’re finally meeting him or her in person, you’re underwhelmed by their quiet personality or fidgeting. Before you write off a candidate as a bad fit for the company, ride out the rest of the interview, especially if their qualifications and skills make them suited for the job. They could be nervous, having an off day, or requrire some time to get warmed up in a conversation.

Try this: Get the candidate more involved in the conversation by asking them an open-ended question. Something like, “How was your weekend?” or “How about them Giants, huh?” or the all-time favorite, “What’s the weather like out there?” is a good way to get the ball rolling on the conversation. Also, be sure to communicate your interest in what the candidate has to offer to the company.

Start off with a compliment on their portfolio and transition into a question asking about a recent project they worked on. If the interview starts to fizzle even after a few attempts to reignite your hiring hopes, reconsider taking a look at other well-suited candidates, as this compatability issue could pose long-term problems with how they jive with the rest of the team.

You’re following a scripted list of questions, and it’s becoming very clear to the candidate.

Have you ever gone down a street dotted with Stop sign after Stop sign after Stop sign? Applying this same touch-and-go nature to your interviewing technique can be harmful to your relationship with the candidate and to the candidate’s experience with the company. You’re stiff and the conversation is choppy, tense, and a little uneasy, and the candidate’s engagement is dropping.

Try this: Instead of paying attention to the dialogue structure as an interview and closely tracking the list that’s been set by you or a higher-up, think of it as a conversation in which you’re asking for directions.

There’s enough curiosity and comfort to keep the flow of a conversation you’d have between friends, but a decent amount of information you still need to know to keep the balance between how much you’re talking and how much time the candidate spends to share his or her response. Use candidates’ answers to frame your replies, and to transition into other questions that bounce around the list. Use questions as a guide, not as a template to the interview.

You don’t know enough about the job position to answer the candidate’s questions.

Up until this point, the interview’s been going well. The candidate is engaged in the conversation, shared insightful answers, and now that you’ve reached the end of the interview, he’s following up with questions about the role that you just don’t have the answer to.

Try this: A safe way to go is to defer the candidate’s questions to the hiring manager. “Great question. Chris, the department head, would be the best person who can answer that. I’ll make a note of this and have him follow up with a call today.” This communicates that you recognize there’s an interest to learn more about the position, that you’ll do what you can to (quickly) bridge the lack of information, and that you respect the candidate enough to admit you don’t know enough to give an appropriate answer. But, you know, it wouldn’t hurt to be better prepared for next time.

Someone was late to the interview, and now you’re pressed for time.

It was traffic. The candidate couldn’t find your office. You had a conference call that went a few minutes overtime. Drawbacks happen, and being late to an interview isn’t necessarily a quantifiable measure of a candidate’s ability or skill.

Try this: Rather than rushing through the interview to make up for losing ample time to get to know a candidate, ask if he or she is able to stay past the original hard stop. If they’re not able to, offer to reschedule or to even meet them somewhere more convenient, closer to their home or office. It’s a polite gesture that shows your effort to amend the interview hiccup, especially if you were the one who wasn’t on time. Similarly, you could offer to run the interview as a video conference call at another date.

Like mom said: Practice makes perfect, and locking down an interview style that works best for you to get to know a candidate can take some time. Try doing dry runs of your interviews with a colleague or a friend, and test out their feedback by applying it to your technique. You could also ask candidates for their feedback on your interviewing skills, which not only helps you improve, but lets them know you're genuinely interested in giving other candidates a good experience, too.

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