How to Prepare for Interview Day

It’s finally here—Interview Day!

Interview Day is Step 4 on the Hire with Confidence checklist, and is where you can take what you’ve learned on paper about your candidates and dig into the details with a face-to-face discussion. 

Not only is Interview Day the opportunity to sell your company and your open position, it’s also when you will determine if your candidates are a culture and core values fit.

To ensure Interview Day goes well, we advise you take the following steps:

Step 1: Prepare your team

Gather your team and review the position profile. Make sure they understand the requirements of the job and the skills and experience required to be successful. 

Your interview questions should be “descriptive situational interviewing” questions. This is an interview strategy that asks an interviewee to give real life examples. 

The questions usually begin with “Tell me about a time when…” or with probing questions like, “Are you a good communicator? Why do you believe so?”

Read through the interview questions to make sure everyone is familiar with them, and go over the schedule for the day.

Step 2: Use a candidate rating form

It’s important that your team document their thoughts and impressions throughout Interview Day. If you are interviewing back to back candidates it can be easy to confuse who said what. We recommend that all the interviewers document their notes the same way using the same candidate rating form. Discuss the types of answers you are hoping to hear with each of the questions. 

Step 3: Conduct the interview

The team leader will introduce the candidate to the team members, explain the schedule, and ensure the interviews run on time. Work your way through the prepared interview questions for each candidate, and listen for those real life examples. If the candidate is vague or dances around the question, you could say, “I am beginning to understand you as a communicator. However, can you please illustrate your point with an example of how you solved this problem?” 

Be a good listener. It’s okay to ask a question and experience an awkward silence for a bit while you wait for them to come up with an answer. The candidate should be speaking 90% of the time. 

The whole interview should last around 90 minutes. Plan to ask your questions for the first 75 minutes, and allow 15 minutes for the candidate to ask his/her questions.

Step 4: Determine next actions

Let the candidates know if there will be further follow up, background checks or reference checks. Provide them with a timeline for when they might expect to hear the outcome of the interview. 

Interview Day is an exciting time because you are that much closer to finding your Superstar. A well-run Interview Day is a glimpse into what it would be like to work in your company, and will elicit excitement and buy-in from your prospective Superstar.

It can also be overwhelming. There are a lot of moving parts and many decisions to make.  

That’s why it’s so important to get it right. If you need help planning or executing your Interview Day, identifying the right candidate rating form, or with any step in the hiring process, please contact VisionSpark today. This is our specialty and we would be glad to help!