One of the biggest hiring mistakes we see regularly is the recruiting team that has become complacent in their interviewing process. This can lead to a recruiter conducting a superficial interview that doesn’t get to the heart of the candidate’s motivation, experience, and skills. If your company is having a hard time attracting and retaining top talent, try looking at your recruiting team to determine if they’ve grown stale. 

Avoid the Superficial Interview 

If your hiring team conducts a superficial interview, no one will be satisfied with the result. Conducting interviews is an incredibly important part of the hiring process, so being sloppy or failing to complete due diligence will lead to a bad hire almost every time.  

A superficial interview fails to probe more deeply into the candidate’s responses. Every candidate should be carefully vetted. Although this is a time-consuming process, it’s necessary to save your organization a lot of pain down the road after the orientation is over. Why is this probing so important? 

The reality of today’s hiring process is that most candidates over-inflate their credentials both on paper and in the interview. If your hiring team fails to dig a little further into a candidate’s surface answers, the hiring decision may move forward, but it will be less informed. Recruiters must be empowered to become “interview detectives” as they ferret out the real motivations behind the fluffy resume or candidate interview.  

Here are some good questions to ask during your next candidate interview. 

Five Questions to Move Beyond the Superficial Interview 

Some of the key characteristics that the best candidates exhibit include: 

  • Initiative 
  • Determination 
  • Leadership 
  • Adaptability 

These traits are those critical “soft skills” that are harder to uncover, but possibly even more important that concrete experiences. How can an interviewer go beyond the surface question to dig down and determine if the candidate has these characteristics? Try these questions: 

  • Tell me about a time when you exhibited a high level of initiative? What happened? What, specifically, did the candidate do? What was the outcome of their actions? 
  • Describe a project where you had a significant setback but persevered. What were the roadblocks to success? Where they overcome? If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently? 
  • What was the last project where you exhibited leadership? Who and how did you lead? How did your leadership motivate or inspire the team? What circumstances thwarted your efforts? Did the project succeed? 
  • What does adaptability mean to you? When was the last time you exhibited the trait? Tell me about a project where your ability to adapt was crucial to the team? 

Exelare Is Here For You!

There is a certain amount of repetition in every interview. We understand how a recruiter or a hiring team can get a little stale and miss critically essential facts during the interview process. But your organization has a lot riding on your ability to get to the heart of the candidate you’re screening. If you’re finding many new hires wash out quickly, it might be because your hiring team needs to jump-start their interview process. Exelare has software that can help. Contact us for a free demo today.