Get more out of your IT interviews

Conducting an interview on site goes far beyond the mere communication with the candidate. You must also ensure that your team is prepared to create the most comprehensive, fair and repeatable assessment possible - and this type of assessment does not happen by chance. Often it is the case that the interview teams were not focused on what they should have been evaluating. In order to normalize this process, it was started to conduct short interview meetings in advance.

The pre-interview meeting is exactly as it sounds: a briefing before the start of interviews to ensure that everyone has a clear role in the interview process. If candidates answer the same questions in multiple interviews, they will not only get tired but your team will also not receive a comprehensive and accurate assessment of their skills. The horror!

Let's review when and how a pre-meeting will be conducted and what you hope to achieve from it.

Prepare yourself

The personnel officer (that's you!) should arrange a 30-minute meeting with the candidate before they come on site. You don't need to do this for every single candidate - the pre-interview meeting is most useful when you're hiring for a brand new role, or if it's been more than six months since you last recruited for this role. Send a document containing the following elements to the candidate before the meeting starts:

• A link to the job description
• An overview of the interview process, in which it is specified in detail which phases are passed through by which persons
• Examples of what the best-fit candidate might look like (“benchmark candidates”).

Before beginning the meeting, ensure that everyone has access to the shared document containing the job description and understands the organizational requirements that come with the role.

Hand things over

The hiring manager provides each recruiter with the rating range they should aim for in an interview to ensure there is as little overlap as possible.

If everyone is clear on which area they should focus on, go through some benchmark candidates to give them an idea of what the perfect candidate looks like.

Current employees can be included in this process to help the team better understand what the hiring manager is looking for.