Collaboration is key, here are some ways that companies can improve interview practices

When your business needs to hire someone new, what happens?

Chances are the HR manager posts a job on a jobs board somewhere online, a bunch of people send generic resumes, and one person interviews all the candidates and makes a unilateral decision based on questions such as, ‘tell me about yourself’.

Unfortunately, this is not the best way to find the best candidates for a job.

Also Read: 8 interview questions you can use to distinguish A players from the pack

Assembling the right team starts with better-interviewing practices, and that’s something you can start improving today.

Finding the right candidates

Posting jobs on online jobs boards may seem like the best thing to do, but there are plenty of other ways to go about finding job candidates.

If you do post jobs, be sure to post on the right jobs board for your industry.

If you are looking for someone to work in cryptocurrency and blockchain, check out cryptojobslist.com.

If you are looking for general professionals, Indeed is a great place to post.

But it’s also a good idea to take a look at your existing network, especially on LinkedIn, to determine whether there’s someone out there who could be a perfect fit for your needs.

Asking the right questions

Thomas Edison was known to ask over 150 questions in a job interview, but somewhere along the line hiring managers trended toward safe and generic questions.

Also Read: 4 key steps to the perfect startup job interview

Anything deviating from approved questions could get a company in trouble, but unfortunately, those questions don’t tell you much.

When you ask someone to tell you about themselves, more often than not you are going to get a regurgitated version of what is already on their resume or in their cover letter.

It’s information you already have, so the question really serves no purpose.

If you want to gauge how well someone will do in a given position, you have to ask better questions.

For starters, asking a job candidate what interests them about your company or about the position to which they are applying can help you learn a lot about them.

First, it tells you whether they have taken any time to research your company or the position, which is something all job seekers should do.

Second, it tells you what they think they can add to the team that is of value and how they see themselves filling the role.

Next, instead of asking questions about their past, focus on the future.

Asking why the left their last job is almost always irrelevant and it doesn’t tell you anything about what they can do.

Instead, ask about their vision for the future to gauge skills and ambitions.

Hiring by committee

When you have one person doing all the interviewing and hiring, it can skew the talent pool. New hires are subject to the biases of one person, and the rest of the team has to compensate.

The purpose of hiring new people for your team is to fill a skills gap that the team is lacking, and since the whole team will have to collaborate to get work done it makes sense that everyone, or at least someone from every department, should have a say in who gets hired.

Interviews by the committee are less likely to be biased as there are safeguards in place to prevent one person from making the final call.

For companies that value diversity and inclusion, this is an especially important step toward assembling a team that is going to be more powerful together than the sum of its parts.

Also Read: Acing your startup interviews as a fresh grad

Better interviews build better teams

Teams need to have complementary skills sets and have a cultural fit that allows them to overcome obstacles and to solve problems together.

Better hiring practices help you to find candidates who know how to put aside differences to work together on a team as well as those who bring new skills to the table.

–

Editor’s note: e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

Join our e27 Telegram group here, or our e27 contributor Facebook page here.

Image Credit: You X Ventures

The post Better interviews are more likely to build better teams appeared first on e27.