How to interview someone? A beginner’s guide to running job interviews
By: Max Korpinen
Tags: Recruiting, Hiring, Job Interview, Interview, Recruitment

Interviewing is not only for recruiters or executives. Most people will end up interviewing someone at some point in their careers. However, if you’re doing it for the first time or still figuring it out, the task can be daunting. Hiring mistakes are very costly, and the process of gathering candidates is time-consuming, so you don’t want to mess it up. But don’t worry, you won’t! As long as you prepare well.

You might be a fresh manager making the decisions, a domain expert there to evaluate technical skills, or a team interviewer to look at “culture fit.” It doesn’t matter. If you’re getting started with running job interviews, this guide is for you.

Conducting job interviews is not only about asking questions. If you want to do the job properly, you should think beyond that. The interview process consists of the following steps:

Job analysis Interview preparation Interviewing Decision-making

By following the steps detailed in this guide, you’ll gain confidence and skills to work through the process of interviewing someone (or, like in most cases, several someones) and making the best possible hiring decisions.

Step 1: Job analysis

Interviewing starts from making sense of what you’re looking for in the first place. Job analysis is the phase where you analyze the job role you’re looking to fill. Because if you don’t clarify what skills, knowledge, or attributes the job requires, how can you reliably evaluate and compare candidates for the position?

Many people skip this part, which is one of the leading causes of hiring mistakes! Don’t be that person.

A simple way to do a job analysis is — you know it! — interviewing. But at this step, you’ll not be interviewing candidates. Who, then? It depends on what you want to achieve with your interview. For example, are you evaluating technical skills? Or maybe you’re tasked with assessing culture fit? Or both? You can borrow the expertise and knowledge of various people around your organization to understand better what you should focus on in the interview process. Of course, if your company is smaller and you don’t have those people around you, nothing stops you from finding these people from outside your company too!

Hiring manager: The person the candidate will report to is usually called the “hiring manager.” Generally speaking, hiring managers are the leaders of some team or workgroup.

Hiring managers have good visibility in their team’s culture. They decide what work behavior gets rewarded and what gets punished. Hiring managers know how their team collaborates, gives feedback, and sets goals. They can usually tell a lot about the individuals in the group as well. Hiring managers usually establish the overall vision for their team and can offer great insight into what sort of candidates might like working with them. When interviewing the team manager about the job position, you should also pay attention to their leadership and management style.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “people quit managers, not jobs.” That’s why it is essential to understand and put to words what it would be like to work under this particular manager. And be open about that to your candidates!

Domain expert: The people who are currently doing or have previously done the job you’re hiring for can be called domain experts. If you’re hiring a front-end developer for some team, ask around: Who is the top front-end developer currently working in your company? That’s the person you should talk with during the job analysis phase. If they also work in the same team that the new candidate will join, even better!

Domain experts are a great source of information about the technical requirements for the job. They have the best view into what skills, knowledge, or attributes are needed to do well in your company as a front-end developer (or whatever their domain in your case is). In addition, they’ve walked the path to become a top performer in what they do, so they have excellent knowledge about career progression, professional development, and other support that the company offers.

If they also happen to belong to the same team where you are hiring, they can also share a lot about the day-to-day of the team, the daily and weekly routines, and the general atmosphere of their workgroup. In addition to technical requirements, understanding the team environment is vital to evaluating how candidates could fit in.

HR person: Why should we talk with HR when doing a job analysis? Because the HR team is the champion of your company culture!

People working in HR (especially recruitment) usually set organization-wide criteria for cultural traits. For example, your company might have a set of values that they aim to strengthen in the big picture. Imagine being Leonardo Da Vinci, the creative genius, working in a bureaucratic government office. It would drive you mad! That’s a mismatch that HR can help you avoid. Talking with HR will give a great understanding of how to consider company values when hiring.

Another area of expertise of HR is salary and benefits. You are very likely to get questions about compensation from your candidates, and the better you can answer, the more your candidates will trust you in the process.

You don’t have to talk with everyone from the above list (first of all, you might be one of those people, which is an excellent starting point), but the more information you can gather and write down, the better you can establish the requirements for the job.

Building a solid foundation for the interview process through proper job analysis and understanding is crucial and will considerably improve your interview results.

Step 2: Interview preparation

Before you rush into a meeting room (or an online meeting) with your first candidate, let’s take a moment to prepare. If you’ve successfully completed step 1, job analysis, you should now have a list of job requirements to guide you through the rest of the interview process.

Keep in mind that your time is restricted. You might only have a 60-minute interview slot per candidate, which means that you can’t possibly evaluate everything that you found out during job analysis. Summarizing your list of job requirements into a handful (around 2–5) main ones might help. Knowing what you now know, what are the top requirements you think your candidates definitely should fulfill to succeed in the role? Focus on those, and only on those.

Your goal in step 2 is to prepare a set of questions that you go through with all your candidates. In addition, you should prepare some criteria for evaluating those questions. The name of this interviewing method is “structured interviewing.” You can find a more in-depth article about it here.

This step is somewhat dangerous because the internet is full of blog articles titled “Elon Musk’s top 3 interview questions.” Forget reading micro-expressions and other psychological mumbo-jumbo; the main thing you should understand is this: the interview questions should relate to the job requirements. That’s it. If you ensure that the questions you ask in your interviews follow this simple guideline, you’re doing your job better than most.

When you’re developing your list of job interview questions, you might want to search for behavioral or situational interview questions. According to research, they are the most effective question types in job interview situations. In short, behavioral questions ask how the candidate acted in the past, and situational questions ask how the candidate would act in a hypothetical situation. So, for example, if leadership skills are an essential job requirement, you could use questions like:

Tell me about a time when you had to motivate a group to get through a challenging situation. (behavioral)

Imagine that your team was going through a challenging situation, and everyone was starting to feel de-motivated. What would you do? (situational)

Proper interview questions like the ones above are about digging deep. You should spend at least 5 minutes on each such question, but I would encourage you to budget about 10 minutes for each because you’ll be spending time on some small talk and Q&A as well.

If you run into a dead-end with interview preparation, HR is your friend. Get in touch with a recruiter from your company (or your network) and ask for help.

Step 3: Interviewing

Now we should be done with steps 1 and 2. We’ve analyzed the job role and know what is required to perform well in the job. We’ve also prepared a question list that we will use with all the candidates. It is finally time to interview!

When you’ve prepared well, the things you should mainly worry about are being nice, gathering evidence, and time management.

When you prepare well, interviewing will actually be the easiest part of the recruitment process!

Being nice: These days, not only the company gets to choose their favorite candidate. Candidates, especially the good ones, have lots of opportunities. If they feel that they were treated poorly during their interview process, they’ll look for something else. That’s it; you missed your shot. Spend some time introducing yourself, telling about your company, and be interested in the candidate as well. Be human. Start with building rapport, and end with a Q&A where the candidate gets to ask questions. They’re not just some data waiting to be gathered, but they’re a real person with hopes and dreams. Show them that you are too.

Gathering evidence: The bread and butter of the interview situation is gathering evidence. Essentially, this means asking questions, asking follow-up questions, and making comprehensive interview notes. As we discussed in step 2, dig deep instead of just rapid-firing a mass of superficial questions. There is a fantastic mnemonic for asking behavioral follow-up questions: STAR. It stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. Some candidates might struggle with answering questions. Please don’t hold it against them, but help them! If the candidate gets stuck or their answers fall short or lack depth, follow up with questions such as: Tell me more about the situation? What were you trying to achieve? What actions did you take? What was the end result? Asking for concrete details also helps ensure that the candidate is talking about some actual event that happened.

Time-management: Some candidates talk more than others. It is natural, but it causes a logistical problem with time. Even if it is distracting, you should mind the time and ensure that you’re not spending too much time on self-introductions or that individual questions don’t run too long. Why? Because if you fail to ask some crucial questions from some candidates, comparing all the candidates at the end of the process will become problematic. It often helps if you explain to the candidate how you aim to structure the interview before you start the interview. Then your candidate will have clear expectations for the session, and they will more likely understand if you have to cut their answer short at some point.

You have your interview template from step 2 to guide you, so there’s not that much to worry about. When you prepare well, interviewing will actually be the easiest part of the recruitment process!

Step 4: Decision-making

We’ve come quite far! From a comprehensive job analysis to comprehensive interview preparation and finally running a set of job interviews, you now have a list of candidates and a pile of notes about the candidates. So how do you go on to decide who to offer the job to?

The research around various selection methods suggests that companies should use “algorithmic” decision-making to get the best results. Therefore, as part of step 2, you should develop scoring criteria for individual questions and a simple algorithm that reflects which requirements are the most important. It is essential to do this before you start interviewing to avoid getting biased by the people you meet during the interview process.

Making algorithmic decisions is quite simple when you turn your interview results into numbers. You have a list of questions you have asked from all candidates, so evaluate the candidates’ answers with numbers. For example, you can use a score of 1 to 5 for every question, and if you consider some questions more important than others, multiply them with 1.5. Then, after each interview, score your candidate’s answers, sum all evaluations together, and voila, you have a total score. Repeat the process for all the candidates, and you should now have a ranked list of candidates.

Many of you might be frowning at the previous paragraph right now. You are tempted just to use your best judgment and expert opinion to pick your favorite candidate. After all, you just saw them all and have a pretty good idea of who was the best. However, a lot of research exists about clinical (gut-based) versus mechanical (algorithmic) decision-making. It seems that we’d make much better decisions if we just forgot our biased opinions and let a spreadsheet do its job. We’re only human, and we tend to get distracted by unnecessary details (“that candidate went to the same school I did, so they must be awesome!”) that, in the end, don’t really matter.

That’s it! I guarantee that if you follow the steps detailed above, your interview results will be far ahead of most interviewers. It takes time and effort, but you can achieve great results with job interviews by following a solid process. If you don’t feel like doing the manual work, you can use apps like Hireproof to run effective interview processes.

Happy interviewing!