by D. P. Noe

Created on: March 13, 2010   Last Updated: March 19, 2010

With all the competition for hiring the best and the brightest, promote your organization as a great place to work. If you have a reputation of being a great organization to work for, you can attract talented and skilled individuals to interview for positions in your organization. With a pool of talented applicants, it is a major step to maximizing the results of the interview process and hiring the best person suited for the position.

When you conduct an interview, you are looking to find the most talented person from a group of several candidates that have been asked to interview. It is the primary tool to collect information from the candidates to determine which candidate has the right knowledge and skills you are looking for and will enhance quality of the organization. If you can maximize the results of conducting the interview, you can determine which candidate is the right individual for the organization.

After you have set up several candidates for the interview, review what the specific talents and skills the position requires. Are there any specific competencies or knowledge that are needed in order to be able to perform the job successfully. This will help you to weed out candidates that you have interviewed that are not the right fit for the organization.

When you are interviewing several candidates, put together a guideline so that you ask the same questions from all the candidates. This provides you with a mechanism to review all the candidates on the same playing field based on the feedback that you receive during the interview. You cannot accurately compare candidates if you have asked different questions from each candidate.

Questions that focus on the candidates behavior in similar job roles can be very revealing and provide a great deal of information about the candidate. Skilled interviewers will strongly encourage the use of behavior questions in the interview process. How an individual handled previous situations can be used as a eyeglass to the future. The experiences that provide an example of previous behaviors needs to be recent and not something that they did 10 years ago. Most likely what an individual did several years ago will not have relevance in the current job market.

The environment needs to be interview friendly. The candidate should feel relaxed and expect that the interviewer totally will focus their time on them. It is very disrupting to the interview process to constantly having people come in and

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