Interviewing Techniques To Improve Your Hiring Process and Secure Top Candidates

Hiring managers and job seekers alike often dread the interview process. It’s a high-stakes arena where everyone wants to say things just right and present a good front. Interviews that go poorly can feel like a waste of time and may not reveal anything helpful about the candidate.

Effective interviewing techniques change that, though. Your team can make more informed, successful hiring decisions by improving your interview process. Your job candidates will have a better experience, and you’ll have less employee turnover. Better interviewing is a win-win for everyone involved. 

Learn how to help your team implement strategic interviewing techniques at every step of the interview process. 

Understanding interviewing techniques

The average person unfamiliar with interviewing techniques commonly thinks that running interviews is simple. The interviewers just ask the candidates about topics to understand them better and collect information to make hiring decisions.

In reality, interviewing techniques are more complicated and varied than that. These techniques encompass the structure, tone, and content of each interview. And there’s no one-size-fits-all interviewing technique. The interviewing techniques that work for one company or one job opening may not be as effective for another. 

It’s the recruiter’s and hiring team’s job to decide which interviewing techniques will improve their hiring processes and help them land the top candidates. To do that, you first need to understand the different options and the advantages and disadvantages of each. 

Preparing for the interview

Walking into an interview fully prepared is the best way to ensure it goes smoothly. Before your interviewers and hiring managers meet with candidates, they need to review resumes and applications from all the applicants. It’s also useful to hold intake meetings with your hiring managers to collectively establish what the ideal candidate for the position looks like.  

Selecting candidates to interview

At this stage, your team is weeding out unsuitable candidates and getting broad-stroke insights into the applicant pool. Many companies now use AI-powered applicant tracking systems (ATS) to scan applicants’ resumes for keywords to pick out the top candidates for manual review. Automating this first step with an ATS reduces the work your hiring team needs to tackle, reducing your time to hire. 

Choosing your interview questions

Once the hiring team reviews the resumes and applications submitted by the top candidates for the position, they can start crafting your interview questions. Make sure they strive to include a mix of standard questions you would ask applicants for any position and job-specific questions. 

Standard interview questions include:

• What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?
• What are your career goals over the next five years?
• What are your salary expectations?
• Why do you want this position?
• What is your greatest career accomplishment?

Questions like these apply to any position but don’t stop there. Think about the questions that arose while reviewing applications and resumes. What specific things do you want to know about each candidate that would help you decide whether they’re the right fit for the role? The person the successful candidate will report to and other professionals in that department may have insights into role-specific interview questions that would be useful. 

Work with your hiring team to make sure all the interview questions are legal and respectful. Review applicable federal and state employment regulations if you’re unsure what you can and cannot legally ask. It’s better to weed out illegal or inappropriate questions ahead of time than risk alienating candidates and facing potential legal consequences.

Scheduling interviews

Scheduling an interview can get complicated when planning to interview more than a few candidates. Having to go back and forth repeatedly between the candidates and the hiring team to find agreeable times is frustrating and lengthens the hiring process unnecessarily. In 2023, talent teams still spent over a third of their time scheduling interviews. 

Instead, use interview scheduling software to efficiently find times for all your candidate interviews. Software like GoodTime uses AI to eliminate interview scheduling headaches. Even when the human eye can’t find scheduling solutions, GoodTime seamlessly coordinates all your candidate interviews. 

Preparing for individual interviews 

Develop a general framework of questions to ask each candidate, including both standard and job-specific questions. Interviewers should try to avoid asking candidates for information you already have elsewhere. For example, they don’t need to ask them to repeat their contact information or basic employment history since you already have access to that information on their resumes. 

If there are specific details the team wants to know about individual candidates, add personalized questions to the existing interview questions. Something on a candidate’s resume may require additional clarification, so they should jot down that question to add to their interview. 

Before each interview, the hiring team may find it helpful to review the candidate’s application and resume again and have it available for reference. The better the interviewers familiarize themselves with the candidates ahead of time, the more efficient and effective the interviews will be. 

Conducting the interview

The next step is to actually conduct your interviews. Remember that every moment your candidates are on-premises or signed in to online interview software is part of the interview — not just the structured question section. 

Creating a welcoming environment

With that in mind, strive to foster a welcoming environment for candidates as soon as they arrive. 

Make sure all of the people involved in the interview (if there are multiple) arrive on time so you don’t leave the candidates waiting. Katrina Collier, a candidate engagement expert and author of The Robot-Proof Recruiter, says, “This is a candidate’s market. You can bet that if you’re late for an interview, they will go and report that on Glassdoor or Indeed.” Start the interview at the scheduled time. 

It’s normal for interviewers to feel somewhat stressed or formal, but let them know they shouldn’t be afraid to be more relaxed and conversational. Small talk, though it may feel like filler, can help your team understand who your candidates are as people.  

Using behavioral and situational interview questions

There are two main types of interview questions — behavioral and situational. Behavioral questions address a candidate’s past experiences handling specific circumstances at work. By contrast, situational questions are hypothetical and ask how the candidate would behave in different situations that might arise. 

Behavior interview questions to ask include:

• When did you use leadership skills to accomplish a task at work?
• Describe a time when you could not fulfill your responsibilities. How did you learn from that?
• Tell us about a time an unexpected development interrupted your plans. How did you adapt?

Your behavioral questions should tie into the key attributes that candidates need to succeed in the role, like leadership skills or adaptability. 

Sample situational interview questions you may want to use include:

• What would you do if you realized you made a serious error and no one had noticed?
• What would you do if your manager asked you to take on new responsibilities with which you were not familiar?
• What would you do if you had multiple deadlines to meet and not enough time to complete all the necessary work?

Keeping the interview structured but flexible

Before the interview even starts, the interviewers should have a general structure and key points in mind. However, every candidate is different, and they need room to adapt the interview based on the candidates’ responses. For example, if a candidate brings up an interesting point about your industry that the interviewers want to explore further, give them the freedom to pursue that. Adding a small time buffer of 15 to 20 minutes to the given time for each interview gives your team the flexibility to adapt.

Techniques for different interview types

Different interview types require slightly different techniques. If your company uses multiple interview types, adapt your process for each. 

One-on-one vs. panel interviews

In one-on-one interviews, you have the opportunity to make a connection with the candidate and learn more about them as a person. The interviewer should focus on building a rapport and making the interview more of a conversation.

Panel interviews are typically more formal. Remember to coordinate between the different panel members and ensure everyone knows their role. The benefit of panel interviews is that the interviewers can discuss the candidate together afterward to reach a consensus. 

Virtual vs. in-person interviews

You also need to decide between virtual and in-person interviews. Virtual interviews have the advantage of being more convenient for candidates, but they make connecting more difficult. 

Rod Adams, talent acquisition and onboarding leader at global professional services firm PwC, says the firm’s fully remote interview process helped them “reach people from a vast range of experiences and diverse backgrounds.” If you’re not satisfied with your current candidate pool, switching to virtual interviews may help you connect with more diverse candidates. 

For in-person interviews, focus on making the entire environment welcoming from the moment the candidate steps in the door. Everyone interacting with the candidates should be positive and friendly to help them form a favorable opinion of your organization.

Post-interview strategies

After you conduct your interviews, it’s time for the hiring team to get together and do the interview debrief. This is when you discuss your opinions of the candidates, weighing them against each other based on the information you learned during the interviews. 

If your team needs more information from a candidate before hiring, follow up to ask questions or schedule another interview. 

Make it your policy to reach out to all the candidates you interviewed after you make your hiring decision. While 40% of job candidates report being ghosted after interviews, that simply isn’t professional behavior. Sending short emails to let the unsuccessful candidates know they didn’t get the position is the polite thing to do. 

When all is said and done, make sure to evaluate your interview process. Look for areas you can improve or become more efficient going forward. It won’t be long before it’s time to interview candidates for another position, so you should always be refining your interview process. 

Building better interviews for a stronger hiring process

Interviews are essential to the hiring process, yet they trip up so many hiring teams. Focus on thoroughly preparing your interviewers and hiring managers for the interviews, choosing the right interview structure for your goals, and refining the process as you go. 

Incorporate automation through software like GoodTime whenever possible to save time and effort. GoodTime’s AI-powered interview scheduling software will help you easily coordinate your interviews so you can focus on finding and securing the best candidates.