Interview Best Practices

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Interview Best Practices

Interviewing a new candidate for a position is so important because you are determining whether the person is a good fit for the position, the company, your team, and more. Before you begin, it’s important to brush up on some interview best practices to ensure that you’re handling the process in the best way. While Interview Intelligence software could be a great way to develop common interview questions that can help you determine the quality of your candidates, but you can also use an interview preparation checklist to create your own quality interview. 


Below are some great interview preparation tips for hiring managers and hiring teams. We’ll teach you how to prepare for a Zoom interview as well as provide you with some tips for developing the right kinds of interview questions and answers that you should be looking for from your candidates. Some items that should be on your interview preparation checklist as the hiring manager are:

  • Prepare a list of questions that the right candidate needs to know the answer to. 
  • Practice explaining your company and the open position in a clear and understandable way. Remember that you’re interviewing the candidate, but they are also interviewing you to make sure that the position is appealing to them as well!
  • Consider the questions that your candidate is likely to ask your hiring team so that you’re prepared to answer them on the spot. 

Interviewing a new candidate may be a challenge, but it is also a challenge worth rising to! If you’re able to weed out the best candidates from among the competition, you can be rewarded with a quality team member who will be a healthy, productive addition to your team.

If you are not a hiring manager but the candidate, there are also some helpful interview preparation tips that can help you stand out from the competition. Some items to have on your interview preparation checklist are:

  • Research the company and position.
  • Practice your elevator pitch.
  • Prepare answers to common interview questions.
  • Dress professionally and appropriate for the role you are interviewing for.
  • Arrive early to your interview and bring copies of your resume and references.

The interview process is a very important part of choosing a new team member. This process gives everyone the opportunity to simulate the working relationship and determine whether the candidate would be a good addition to the team. Whether you’re using interview intelligence to select the candidate or a more grassroots approach, it’s important to take advantage of the opportunity to really make sure that the team and candidate work well together. 

Interviewing Best Practices 2022

When hiring for a new position, it's important to follow interviewing best practices for 2022 in order to ensure you're making the best hiring decision for your company. Here are some tips for managers conducting interviews:

- Make sure you have a clear understanding of the job requirements and what the ideal candidate would be like before beginning the interview process. This will help you to ask more targeted questions and get a sense of whether or not the candidate is a good fit for the role. This is one the hiring best practices for managers. After all, you cannot expect your candidate to have a strong understanding of the role unless you also have one!

- Avoid asking leading questions that can bias the answers you receive. Instead, try to ask neutral, open-ended questions that will allow the candidate to speak freely about their qualifications and experiences.  Avoiding bias in interviews is considered an interview best practice for hiring managers, so it’s also important to brush up on how to avoid bias in your interview process

- Pay attention to both what the candidate says and how they say it. Body language, eye contact, and other nonverbal cues can be just as important as the words themselves in understanding whether or not someone would be a good fit for a role.

- Be sure to take some time to talk about your company and the team that the candidate would be working with if they were to be hired. This will give them a chance to ask any questions they have and get a better sense of whether or not the role is a good fit for them. This back and forth discussion is considered to be a recruiting best practices for hiring managers. Sometimes hiring managers make the mistake of doing all of the talking, but it’s necessary to make sure that your candidate also has the opportunity to talk so that you can guage the quality of their responses! 

- After the interview, take some time to debrief with your team and discuss the candidates you interviewed. This gives everyone the opportunity to express their opinions and observations. After all, adding a new team member to the workplace is a matter of importance to every member of the team, so it’s only fair that everyone should at least have the opportunity to express their feelings and observations from the interview process. 

Choosing a new team member is a big deal and something that should be taken seriously. The difference between the right candidate and the wrong candidate can also have a big effect on the outcome of the team’s work. Following these tips will help to ensure that you have a successful interviewing process and end up hiring the best candidate for the job.

Interview Questions

When it comes to interviews, preparation is key. This means not only preparing for questions that the interviewer may ask, but also having a few key questions of your own ready to go.

Asking questions is a great way to show that you're truly interested in the position and the company, and it can help you gather important information.  But, you don't want to ask just any old question - you want to ask smart interview questions.

To help you out, we've put together a list of interview questions with answers that you can use to prepare for your next interview.

1. What inspired the company to start?

2. What are the company's core values?

3. What is the company's mission statement?

4. What are the company's goals?

5. How has the company grown over the years?

6. What challenges has the company faced and how were they overcome?

7. What makes the company unique?

8. Why do you enjoy working for the company?

9. What are the biggest challenges that the company is facing currently?

10. How has your position evolved since you started working here?

The nature of these questions help the interviewer see that you have done your research and prepared for the interview. The answers that you receive can help you to determine whether the values of the company align with your own, as well as how your role would fit into the bigger picture of what the company is trying to accomplish. 

When you’re preparing interview questions, as the candidate or the interviewer, it’s important to truly think about the answers that you would want to receive. An interview process is a unique experience and opportunity to dig deeper into a person’s or company’s motivations before you decide if you’re going to be working together long-term. 

How To Interview Someone

Before you begin the interview process, it’s important to know how to interview someone for information that is most important to you, the company, and the team. Interviewing gives you the opportunity to understand a person’s unique skills, abilities, and motivations, determine whether they would be a good fit for the team, and gather some insights into whether they would be a good asset for your team. 

Preparing in advance is key. Using interview intelligence software can also be helpful as it gives you a “how to interview someone” script so you don’t necessarily have to figure it out on the fly. Gathering the most important information in advance and practicing the interview will make the entire process flow a lot more smoothly, allowing you to focus specifically on the answers and skills of the candidate rather than on your own process. If you’re not sure how to interview someone in the best way to ensure that you’ve hired the right candidate, check out some of our great articles on how to interview.