By gamifying the interview process, you can help your candidate fully demonstrate his/her personal and professional qualities
It’s crucial to find a right employee, so you won’t have to start the recruiting process all over again. Even experienced recruiters and managers can make hiring missteps. In this case, it’s important to admit the fallacy of your decision. As, for example, Tim Cook did regarding John Browett hiring. For a candidate, receiving clear estimates is also vital.
I’d like to highlight three tactics that will help you make a job interview effective both for employers and candidates.
1. Joint questioning
This tactic is also is known as good cop/bad cop interrogation technique. Yet, it works for interviewing process as well. It helps to examine the candidate’s conflict-solving skills and ability to think under pressure.
The general scheme is a following:
First, a candidate is interviewed in stress regime. An interviewer can ask uncomfortable questions, interrupt and doubt candidate’s words. The aim here is to see how a candidate behaves in conflict situations, how easily a person can lose the balance. For the interviewer, the key here is not to go too far.
For example:
- You have 5 minutes to entertain me with a funny story from your life. If I get bored, I think it’s needless to continue the interview.
- Do you really think that your outfit is appropriate for the job interview?
- Your experience is quite curious but I doubt that it will help you in this position in any way. Do you agree?
At the second stage, the job seeker is put in a comfortable atmosphere. The interviewer shows interest in the candidate stressing his/her strengths according to a job description. This kind of interview helps the candidate to relax and see him/her when this person is feeling comfy.
Also read: The growing pains of a recruitment marketplace: An Interview with Upwork’s Bonnie Sherman
For example:
- Make yourself comfortable and take your time to answer the questions.
- We encourage creativity and diversity in all its forms, so feel free to wear any outfit you feel comfortable in.
- Your experience doesn’t relate directly to the position but it can help you to develop a non-trivial approach to the job. And that is what we are looking for.
Joint questioning can help you spot an exceptional employee. Yet, it must be carefully thought out and applied only by experienced HRs and recruiters. The final emotion a candidate feels in the end of this journey must be satisfaction, a sense of a passed test. It’s a sign of a well-led process. If a candidate feels frustrated and depressed after such interview, it means that an interviewer hasn’t done his job.
2. Behavioural interview
This kind of interview is a standard technique that, yet, has its pitfalls. According to it, if we know how a candidate has coped with the working difficulties in the past, we can predict his/her behavior in a new workplace. Interview Edge states that the effectiveness of this method gradually decreases. However, if well applied, it can prove its efficiency.
To make such interview productive you need to follow these tips:
Urge for details. There are plenty of articles about getting a job interview success. Lots of them are written specifically about a behavioral interview model. So the candidates often come with a prepared list of answers and it’s quite hard to take them by surprise. Your task here is to ask for more details and keep your questioning strategy open depending on the information you hear. Smart step here is to ask a candidate to tell about the experience of working with one of his/her referees. Get in touch then with this referee and compare the versions of the story.
Look for patterns. Most of the articles on how to pass a behavioral interview offer a STAR method. It suggests candidates unfold the story about their previous experience in four aspects: situation, task, action, and result. Such response structure may come in handy for the interviewer as well. If a candidate answers according to this plan, it’s easier to trace patterns of his/her behavior.
Ask about candidate’s fails. Talking about the failures can be one of the most demonstrative parts of a candidate’s response. If a person cannot remember any work fails, that means two things. The person is either avoiding to answer or has never come out of the frames of instructions and experimented.
3. Engagement instead of interview
One of the ways to learn more about your candidate is to see this person engaged in some common activity.
Sharing a meal. You can take your candidate out for lunch or dinner break. The way he/she behaves at a dinner table can tell you a lot about this person. The common manner and the way the person treats others — you can trace all these important things during the meal.
You should pay attention to:
- Whether a candidate is attentive to the people around?
- Whether a person is amiable and polite to those who is serving your table?
- Does he/she get easily irritated by minor troubles (like dropping a sugar-bowl or spilling the coffee on a shirt
- How easily a candidate can keep the conversation going
- How patiently a person can wait for her/his turn
Surprisingly, an experience of sharing a meal can reveal whether this candidate fits your team values and the goals of your project. Finally, it will show how comfortable you feel around each other.
Share a game. To see candidates in a competitive but informal atmosphere you can invite them to join some game. For example, I worked in a company where we had a table tennis table. Sometimes when our PM interviewed the potential coworkers, he asks them to join the team tennis tourney. During the game, the whole team could see how a new person takes losing or winning. Whether he or she is glad to see others’ success. Finally, whether a candidate fits the team and everybody feels comfortable around this person.
Games are not only about having fun. It’s a universal form of activity that everybody is familiar with. So by gamifying the interview process, you can help your candidate fully demonstrate his/her personal and professional qualities.
Conclusion
The basic thing you need to learn about interviewing process is that it’s not a one gate play. The evaluating of the candidate is an important side of the process, but definitely not the only one. Your task here is to make sure that the goals and values of a candidate make the perfect match with goals and values of your company. For this, you need to draw a clear and objective picture of your project and the position you are interviewing for. You both are choosing, so you need to make the choice simple for the potential employee.
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