Even the most seasoned interviewers make mistakes. And those mistakes may be costing you the best talent.
Job interviews are the most common hiring tools, yet they are the most susceptible to human error. Improving the success of your interviews is all about avoiding basic mistakes and minimizing potential bias.
So, here are the Top 6 interviewer mistakes, and tips to help you avoid them.
Mistake #1: Jumping to Conclusions
The outcome of an interview is often decided in the first two minutes. Even though the interview may be 30 minutes or longer, our decisions typically occur early in the interview, with the remaining time being used to build our case and support our decision.
How to Avoid:
Nothing sabotages the accuracy of an interview faster than jumping to a quick decision. To limit this error, separate the decision from the interview. Train yourself to focus on note taking during the interview and evaluate afterwards.
Mistake #2: Going with Your Gut
We all tend to think we’re a good judge of character and have a unique ability to hire the right people. Ironically, interviewers with the least experience and training are the most likely to overestimate their ability.
To further complicate things, the least trained interviewers often occupy high-level positions. Time and again, they simply “know a good candidate when they see one.” You can’t argue either for or against their intuition because it isn’t based on objective evidence.
How to Avoid:
The best solution is to make sure that ALL interviewers —whether they’re a recruiter, hiring manager, or CEO—are properly trained and are using the same standard rating criteria. To avoid mistakes, hiring decisions must be based on data, not hunches.
Mistake #3: Relying on Limited Data
Basing decisions on limited data is a sure way to derail an otherwise great interview. Even though there is considerable discourse, usually there are relatively few questions. And if you don’t take good notes, you’re left to making decisions on limited information and what you can remember from the interview. That’s not many data points to use in such a high-stakes decision.
How to Avoid:
A reasonable solution is to create a checklist for each question that includes examples of comments or statements that contribute to a good answer. For each question, the checklist might contain 5 to 10 comments which you can use to check and document what the applicant said. This significantly increases the number of data points, improves the reliability of your decisions, and most importantly, helps you remember the key elements of each interview that might otherwise be forgotten.
Mistake #4: Falling for Embellishment
In a job interview, no one ever says, “all I did was . . .” Instead, applicants may inflate the importance of their past work experience in an effort to make a good impression. In fact, a recent study cited by Forbes reports that 70% of workers lie on their resumes, with the top lies being “embellishing job titles and responsibilities in general (52%), exaggerating the number of people managed (45%) and overstating length of employment (37%).”
While descriptive words like organized, managed, created, launched make sense for some jobs, for other roles, they are red flags. These words sound impressive, yet they may be used to overplay a person’s actual job duties.
How to Avoid:
When red flag words pop up in an interview, ask for specific examples of the actions performed.
Mistake #5: Being Blinded by Neon Answers
A neon answer is one that stands out and attracts special attention. It can either be extremely positive or negative. The pitfall of neon answers is that they can outweigh all other answers combined and therefore skew our decisions. In essence, it’s like a game where one play determines the outcome of the entire game. It’s not always the best player that wins.
How to Avoid:
To make sure you hire the best, consider all of the candidate’s answers. The final decision should be a combination of these answers with each answer contributing equally to the decision. Since neon answers really pop out, it’s easy to catch them. When you do, stop and reflect on how much weight that one answer should be given in comparison to the rest of the interview.
Mistake #6: Talking Instead of Listening
Most interviews gather as well as provide information. The challenge is to balance the time spent talking about your company, asking questions, and listening to applicant responses. And just because you’re asking the right questions, doesn’t mean you’ll get the information you need.
How to Avoid:
To overcome these issues, be sure to spend more time listening than talking. If you’re talking more than half the time, you’re talking too much. Actively listen to applicant responses and use open ended questions that ask what, how, and why. This not only gets applicants talking, it also helps you get the information you need to make an effective decision.
Opinions and human judgments are inherently subjective. As interviewers, our goal is to minimize this subjectivity to make decisions that are more objective, fair, and accurate. By increasing our awareness of potential biases and applying discipline to address them, we can significantly enhance the accuracy of our interviews and ultimately hire candidates who perform as impressively on the job as they did during the interview.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
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Streamline and Automate Your Prescreening Interviews
Drive Better Hiring Decisions with Targeted Employment Interviewing