When hiring new team members for your company, it’s important to stay aware of the trends in recruitment by researching guidelines for effective interview practices. It’s a common misconception that interview practices remain the same from year to year when in reality, interview best practices for hiring managers are continually evolving to meet the needs and demands of the current workforce. Understanding the current candidate pool can be a helpful first step in understanding how to interview someone. For example, if you know what your candidates are looking for, you’ll be better able to provide it to them throughout the hiring process, from your job description and listing to your interview questions, and beyond. 

For hiring managers who want to be ahead of the game and follow the best practices guidelines for an effective interview, it will be necessary to conduct some research into how to interview someone or examples of sample interview questions and answers. You can reap the benefits of a database of sample questions if you utilize interview intelligence software like Pillar’s which enables you to streamline your interview process with best practices that have been shown to be successful already. 

Some of these best practices are:

- Make the candidate feel comfortable. After all, a successful candidate will go on to be your coworker or employee, so you want to make them feel at ease. Also, it’s been shown that candidates who are comfortable during interviews are more capable of being candid as well. 
- Ask questions that are open-ended. This kind of interview question facilitates conversation and more detailed responses, ensuring that the candidate has to make considerations when coming up with their answer. 
- Take mental notes and physical notes more than you speak. Some interviewers make the mistake of oversharing in the interview and not giving the candidate time to share. While of course the candidate is evaluating you as well, there will be opportunities to allow them to ask questions. Your main focus should be the candidate, not yourself or your company. (If it is not the candidate who takes center stage in the interview process, rest assured that even if you don’t notice it, they will, and it will leave a negative feeling about the interview.)
- Know what to avoid and steer clear of in your interview. There are specific questions that cannot be asked in an interview, relating to the candidate’s personal life and background, so it’s important to avoid veering into that area at all when interviewing. A more equitable interview is one that remains strictly professional, as is appropriate. 

In future sections, we’ll get into more detail about how to conduct an effective interview, what steps should be followed and strategies adhered to, and what outcomes you can expect from following them. Keep reading to learn more about effective interviewing. 

Interview Guidelines For Interviewers

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If you are a hiring manager looking for guidelines for effective interviewing, the internet is filled with helpful guides that could potentially provide you with all the information you need. Some of the tips you’ll find include how to start an interview as the interviewer and interviewer preparation before the interview. When you’re reviewing online guides, it can be difficult to know which tips are truly helpful and which are not unless you speak with real individuals about their interviewing experience. Here at Pillar, we’ve gathered professional advice from other interviewers. Knowing what other professional interviewers have to say about the interviewing process can give you the right tools to make your interview effective as well. 

When it comes to interviewing tips for managers, we suggest following some of these basic guidelines for your interview preparation before the interview. 

First, understand the role you are interviewing for, forward and backward. You should become the expert on this position so you know exactly what you’re looking for and what constitutes as red flags in a candidate. This can be accomplished by speaking with other people in the role, if you don’t know already, and perhaps even inviting someone else who is more knowledgeable about to role to join your interviewing team. 

Second, prepare your interview questions based on what you understand about the role and the needs that need to be filled. The quality of your interview questions and the discussion that follows during the interview is the best tool that you have to determine whether a candidate is a good fit for your team. These interview questions should be used for all interviews for this position. Interview intelligence software like Pillar’s can help you keep track of your individual interview processes. 

Third, carefully select who you are going to interview from your candidate pool by using candidate sorting tools such as checklists and preliminary questions. Understanding which candidates are truly qualified and which are not can be a solid start to the interview process and help you “weed out” people who would not be a good fit before interviewing. 

Fourth, contact your candidates to set up interviews and cover any preliminary questions or requests, such as work samples. 

Fifth, prepare your interview process by inputting your standard questions and interview order into your interview intelligence platform, if you use one. If you are working with a large number of candidates or have a frequent need to restaff, interview intelligence software can make your job a lot easier! Need some tips? Check out our article featuring 10 reasons why you need interview intelligence software in your hiring process.  

These are the higher level steps to managing your interview process, but as an interviewer, you may need more specific guidance on creating your actual questions. Read on in our next section for more details about creating your interview questions for your candidates. 

Guidelines For Interview Questions

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When considering the guidelines for interviewers and interviewees, we know that your main concern is understanding the guidelines for interview questions, how to create good ones, how to present them, how to “grade” answers received, etc. Many interview guidelines for hiring managers are not detailed enough as they will provide a few steps to accomplishing the goal but may not give the hiring manager all of the information they need to create an educated and informed hiring decision. A lot goes into creating a good interview, and at Pillar we believe that using interview intelligence software can be the key to organizing it well and making it flow smoothly. 

Most interviewers are interested in creating good questions and structuring an interview process well, but the main concern is the primary goal: knowing how to spot a good candidate at interview and knowing who to make an offer of employment to in the end. When you are considering how to start an interview as the recruiter or hiring manager, you will want to consider your primary goals. Organizing your interview questions, creating a structured interview process, and following all strategic guidelines in your interview process will help you ensure that you are finding the right candidate, which can sometimes feel like finding a needle in a haystack. 

One of the main points of being a good interviewer and finding the right candidate for the role is making sure that you understand the candidates’ skills and qualifications. This is done by asking the right questions and ultimately weighing the answers of your various candidates to determine which are most qualified in the areas that are most important for the role. Interview intelligence software makes it easy to calculate the value of interview answers and in-the-moment responses of hiring teams to the answers provided. Ultimately, the end-goal of effective interviewing is to make the candidates feel heard, to listen to and understand their unique qualifications and knowledge, and make a hiring decision that is right for your team. 

As a hiring manager, it's crucial to keep up with recruitment trends and research updated guidelines for effective interviewing when bringing new team members into your company. Many people believe that interview practices remain constant from year to year, but the truth is that the most effective strategies evolve over time to meet the changing needs and demands of the workforce. To conduct better interviews, it's important to understand the current pool of candidates. Knowing what they are seeking will enable you to tailor the job description, listing, interview questions, and other hiring processes to meet their needs. From here, finding the right candidate to add to your team is a much simpler process.