Screening and assessing job candidates can be a complicated and confusing process, particularly for smaller businesses that don’t have a dedicated HR specialist on staff to manage hiring activities (or it can be overly simple and ineffective, for that matter, if you’re only using resume reviews and unstructured interviews).
With that in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to create Structured Interview Guides that help such businesses better understand the purpose of various jobs, what it takes to be successful, and how to evaluate candidates on critical tasks and competencies. The first is a guide for selecting Human Resources Managers, which provides information on the
- Overall purpose of the job.
- Impact of the hiring decision, should you make the wrong choice.
- Role objectives, tasks and competencies.
- Structured interview questions you should ask finalist candidates.
In order to get the most value out of the structured interview guide, I would suggest that you:
- Ensure that each candidate provides an account of the Situation, Actions taken, and the Results of those actions, when answering the interview questions.
- Keep a record of the candidates’ responses in a notebook, for later review and comparison.
- Use the checkboxes provided after each question to help in rating candidate interview responses.
- Administer a behavioural styles questionnaire to help prioritize questions and identify potential red flags, ideally before the interview.
- Use a cognitive abilities test to assess learning and problem-solving skills.
- Administer a motivational questionnaire to help understand how best to engage and retain the successful candidate once hired.
At this point, I would love to hear your feedback, particularly on how useful the guides would be if you were hiring for the role.
Here is a link to the Human Resources Manager Structured Interview Guide.
Many thanks!