Interviews are the most important step in the recruitment process. They decide the makeup of your employee pool, who are the frontrunners of your organization. Simply put, exceptional organizations need to have high-quality interviews under their belt to build a high-quality and diverse team.
Improving the interview quality is no doubt a herculean task. However, organizations with weak or poor interview quality make for bad hires. Without proper metrics, data, and evidence to make a hiring decision, companies tend to fall back on credentials which makes them prone to all sorts of biases. In contrast, measuring and achieving high interview quality results in better hiring decisions.
Linkedin’s Future of Recruiting Report talks about the quality of your hiring process as the “holy grail” to evaluating candidate performance. The same report states that 88% of companies believe that it would be “very useful” to use metrics to measure interview quality.
Having said that, here are five effective ways to measure interview quality. Mixing up these tactics can help you in enhancing your process.
Utilise Candidate Reviews
Several companies use performance reviews as a measure of quality. Ask the interviewee for feedback on the interview process. This is inclusive of the questions asked and the behavior/mannerisms of the interviewer. These reviews can be used to understand the mistakes made or the problem areas to work on to improve the forthcoming interview quality.
Use Objective Data and Evaluate Hiring Outcome
Using objective data, for example, standardized assessments or samples of work to add to the interview is beneficial. This would provide a much more complete picture of the candidate’s abilities and how well they fit into the job role mentioned.
It is necessary to evaluate the success of the interview to predict the candidate’s performance for the prescribed role. Interview quality can be further improved by correctly using this method.
For example: If the candidate performs exceptionally well in the interview, but not on the job, the interview questions may not have been a good indicator of the candidate’s fit for the role.
Make a Quality Hire Assessment
This involves the gathering of specific evidence of comparable past performance using performance-based interviewing. This particular information mentioned above can be then used to calculate the total score to measure the quality of the candidate hired based on the quality of the interview. Moreover, measuring post-hire quality uses the same factors as pre and post-interview hiring variances to provide better feedback for process improvement. Most often than not, the problems have to do with the lack of clarity regarding the job requirements or the usage of superficial interviewing techniques.
Examples:
- Hiring manager’s satisfaction surveys
- Employee engagement surveys for fresh hires
- Asking managers to rate the new hire’s performance and work
Interview Metrics
Using online metric analytic platforms to measure data is a good way to improve interview quality. Record your interviews to gather data such as
- Speaking time
- Number of questions asked,
- Follow-up question data
This will lead to the identification of interviews that are inconsistent or lack precision in the questions asked which leads to bad/biased choices in recruitment. All of the above adds to the Interview Quality Score which can be displayed at a company-wide level.
Also read: How to Use Interview Data To Make Better Hiring Decisions
Interviews are the most necessary goal-defining step in the process of hiring. Companies need to conduct high-quality interviews to build a good team and measurement of interview quality is the first step to attaining that.
Barraiser is committed to ensuring an improvement in the quality of your interviews, and therefore your hiring. Take inspiration from the above steps to help better the quality of your interviews.
Conclusion
To ensure successful hiring, it is essential to assess the quality of interviews. This can be done by examining factors like the use of structured questions, uniform scoring methods, and proper interviewer preparation. In this way, companies can make better hiring decisions. To measure the quality of an interview, it is important to use structured questions that are relevant to the job and asked equally to all applicants. This ensures a fair and objective evaluation. Companies might benefit from behavioral and situational inquiries that measure necessary skills and talents. Standardized assessment systems are important for evaluating the quality of job interviews. These systems provide a structured way to score applicants’ responses and compare them objectively. Organizations can score each applicant consistently and reduce bias or subjectivity in the evaluation process by assigning numerical scores or using a competency-based approach.
