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Communication skills for effective interviewing

– There is nothing more important in the hiring process than the interview. The interview will help you find the right fit for your organization, so ultimately an interview is helping your business move forward. Interviewees aren’t the only ones who must focus on making the right first impression. You must concentrate on how you present yourself just as much as they do. As the interviewer, you are representing your company, so your actions will speak for the entire organization. Not to worry, I have some great tips to help you make a great impression. Communication researchers have found that 93% of the messages you send are nonverbal.

That’s because nonverbal communication includes your posture, clothing, gestures, eye contact, and what they call paralinguistics. Paralinguistics are all of the things connected to your words, such as how fast or slow you speak, tone of voice, and volume. Your nonverbal communication should express confidence and friendliness all at the same time. As you walk down the hall to meet your candidate in the waiting room, put your shoulders back and stand up straight, but also smile and offer a friendly greeting. To help you better understand the interview process, I’m going to show you a brief interview that highlights poor interviewing skills.

See if you can spot them and then we’ll come back and discuss it some more. Okay, so why do you want this job? – Well, I know you have a great reputation of being a place to work for and I’ve seen all the accolades online. I’d really like to stay at my next job for a long time so the environment is really important to me. – Okay, great. My next question, where do you see yourself in five years? – Over the next five years, I’d like to learn as much as I can and become a team member that you can’t live without.

– Okay, so you wanna be a manager then? – I’d like my career to advance because I do wanna keep growing as a person. I definitely would love to move up the corporate ladder. Is there room for that type of growth? – Yeah, I mean we like to promote from within so if a manager spot opens up, I don’t see why you couldn’t, you know, slide in there. What kinda pay are you looking for, for this job? – Not very much. – So let’s talk about what went wrong in this interview. First, the interview unfolded like an interrogation and the questions were all over the place.

Your job is to make your candidates feel comfortable so they will open up to you. The interview should feel more like you’ve just met at a networking event or even a dinner party. Second, the interviewer’s body language itself is closed off. I wasn’t making great eye contact, my arms were folded, and there was a table in between us. These moves signal that I am closed off, where making eye contact and open body language says I’m friendly and I want to get to know you. Third, I practically told my candidate that she could earn herself a promotion. You never want to say things like that because you can be held to them later by an angry person who ends up not getting promoted.

When someone asks about moving up, your answer is that your policy is to try to promote from within, but that’s all you can offer, so let’s try this again. Wow, so it sounds like we have pretty similar career paths then, so can you walk me through a few of the things that you would do if you got the job. – Well, I know I have a lot to learn so reading what I can get my hands on and talking to coworkers and leaders would really be important to me, and I’d also like to spend some time poking around my office and computer to see what I could learn from the previous person, and I’d definitely spend time getting to know my new subordinates.

I know that those relationships will take time to build so I’d be thinking about the best ways to build them. – Okay, you know when I was 21 I got a job as an Executive Assistant and just right out of the gate was making a lot of different changes because I wanted to really strut my stuff and definitely burned a lot of bridges with these people I was gonna be working with because of all of these changes. – Well, I believe if you’re coming in as a manager and a newbie, you do have to tread lightly and see what kinda changes are necessary and then solicit the teams help in making those changes.

– Yeah. – In fact, I’m not even sure you can make any real changes for at least nine months or a year. – Yeah, great, great observation, so can you tell me about a time that you made an organizational change and what that was and how it unfolded? – Sure, at my last job, I decided that I… – So hopefully you noticed a few things in this interview that made it much more effective. The candidate and I were sitting next to each other to make the interview more like a friendly chat, I was making eye contact while I was jotting down some notes, and I had a conversational response to the candidate’s list.

In turn, she had a conversational response for me and it gave me more insight into her. From there, I was able to slip in a behavior-based interview question or one that asks for a specific example of a specific time she did something I was going to need her to do in this new job. The questions are part of a conversation rather than a series of unrelated questions that feel like an interrogation. This is how I’ll get to know all of my candidates so that I can make the right decision. I also never crossed my arms, which puts up a barrier.

With my posture, gestures, and paralanguage, I was showing that I had genuine interest in this person and I should. Even if I’m thinking she’s not the right fit for this particular job, interviewing is a networking opportunity and maybe she’ll be suited for a job down the road. I even know a woman who interviewed for a company and as it became clear to both her and the employer that the job wasn’t right for her, she referred the employer to someone else. The company hired that someone else. Another woman I know was told that she was overqualified for a job, but six months later she was asked to come on for a special project as a consultant.

Neither of those things would have happened in a Q&A type of scenario. They happened because the interviewer and the interviewee had a conversation and they got to know each other. Going back to my interview, you didn’t see this part, but I also didn’t keep the interviewee waiting. Time is another form of nonverbal communication and making someone wait for 15 or 20 minutes tells them you don’t think they or the position they will fill are important. In the end, if you can think of interviewing more like a networking event than an interrogation, you’ll be much better off and more able to find the right fit for your organization.