Best Practices - Keeping your Managers engaged in the interview process
Hiring is a fast-paced, time-consuming task. Ideally, it would help if you involved many critical stakeholders in the hiring process to find the best candidate for your role.
Managers who are highly engaged in the hiring process will be more focused on subtle details in interviews and more engaging for the interviewee.
Managers who are disengaged or feel like they "just don't have time" to interview candidates will rush the process, leave less detailed feedback, and make a poor first impression on candidates during the interview process.
Since it's essential, what can we do to ensure our managers are engaged in the interview process? Find our top tips below!
Determine what you're hiring for
Hiring is a delicate balance of picking the skills your team is lacking and pairing this with how a new person can add value in the future too. Before entering the hiring process, ensure that your team has analyzed what you're trying to hire for. We recommend this video to get you started if you're new to this process: Creating Predictable and Repeatable Hiring.
Once you've narrowed down what and why you're hiring, you'll have a good outline of what type of person would be ideal for the role.
Please ensure you're screening candidates against these criteria to prevent wasted time in interviews for people who genuinely aren't a fit.
When you have narrowed down the selection, could you brief everyone involved in the hiring process on these critical characteristics to look out for? Make sure to note things that are "nice to haves" versus "must-haves," as well as things that are total "no go."
Defining what "good" looks like in the role will allow everyone to look for the right things as they go through the interview(s).
Could you give interviewers space + time?
Interviewing and hiring take time. Ensure you're giving managers and employees the space to conduct interviews. To avoid interruptions, interviews should be conducted in a quiet, private space - away from the day-to-day distractions of the workspace.
If your team doesn't regularly have computer access, make sure you make a computer available directly following the interview to record their feedback within Trakstar Hire. Doing this quickly after the interview will prevent any information from being forgotten.
When scheduling interviews, ensure the time is convenient for everyone's calendar. The Self Scheduling tool allows candidates to pick from times the interviewers are available, ensuring that the time works for everyone involved.
Making filling out feedback forms easy
Building a solid evaluation form will help guide the hiring team's feedback on candidates when setting up the interview process.
We recommend having enough questions to solicit thoughtful and actionable responses. You should be able to make a next step hiring decision based on the interview feedback left - so make sure that your questions guide you to that answer, and not just "well, they were alright."
While building these forms, do keep length in mind; incredibly complex forms will become tedious for interviewers and diminish the helpful feedback.
For a short form, I recommend asking:
- What are three things that excite you about this candidate?
- What is one thing that concerns you about this candidate?
The system will also automatically default a final question: "Would you recommend moving forward with this candidate?"
If you want to get more detailed in the form, you could also call out specific attributes you are looking for in this role and ask relevant questions.
If you're struggling to get feedback promptly, you can also turn on feedback reminders to automatically remind the interviewers to leave their feedback.
We also always recommend picking the appropriate settings to reduce bias in the interview process - so that interview feedback left by others doesn't influence your team.
And please remember - you always ask for feedback.
Regardless of how many folks your team has hired or how many interviews they've conducted, there is always room for improvement. Could you poll your managers about what is working and what isn't - and update your forms before your next hiring cycle?