Why should you do job interviews and how to do them faster

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Why should you invest time in doing interviews?

Job interviews take up anywhere on an average of 45-90min and this is just the meeting time. On average, an interview can take up to 3 hours when you consider the preparation and feedback, and debriefs if the candidate (interviewee) is to be made an offer! Hiring is a very high-involvement decision – one that cannot be taken easily. What’s worse is that more often than not, interviewing is not part of your job description and contribution to interviews and hiring are not recognized in performance reviews. Might not be an overextension to say that interviews tend to become a thankless job often. Great leaders, however, always recognize top interviewers and keep them close but often miss out on developing new interviewers, and often teams see a reduction in the hiring bar as they expand.

By speaking to hundreds of HR managers over the past few years, we have gained an understanding of the difficulties, complexities, and bandwidth constraints associated with recruiting and interviewing, but we have also learned a great deal about the interests of people managers and hiring managers.

You need to sympathize with interviewers. Doing good interviews is tough especially when you have to squeeze time between back-to-back meetings. Having no recognition or reward for doing good interviews in many companies. Top it up a low candidate success and/or low candidate joining rate makes all efforts seem in vain.

Despite all this, we see the following reasons why you should invest time in interviews and how you, as an interviewer or people manager, make interviews easy and less taxing on your time.

Build relationships

Hiring managers get to meet new people and often get new perspectives. When discussing a candidate’s experience, one often learns a lot about other industries and functions – this will help you when you switch jobs and

Help others

HR is a service role in many companies. HR managers are often responsible for keeping the rest of the company running smoothly. This includes administrative tasks such as managing payroll and benefits and working directly with employees who need help or guidance. So one of the things that you have is BarRaiser helps you a reduction in interview preparation time tremendously.

It helps you to reduce excessive note-taking.
Make efforts during the interview with the interview assistant and post it.
The reduced feedback time by the software is still made efficient as violence continues training.

All this is being done to help the interviewers to reduce the burden on them.

Make a real impact

Without the right team, it’s difficult to succeed and beyond the team, the right mindset of the team is equally important. Interviewers can significantly impact the companies they work for. A good, structured interview can save a lot of waste of time and heartburn and ensure the financial and cultural well-being of the organization.

Continuous learning

Professional skills are constantly evolving and improving. There is usually room to research and grow. You will learn about business, organizational structure, employee engagement, data, technology, and benefits. A good interview should always have feedback from the candidate (interviewee) which will also help improve the low candidate joining rate. A key advantage of doing interviews is interviewer training.

Build hiring analytics

Interviews, when done in a structured manner, can add a lot of data points to a candidate’s journey through the organization (even after they join). Interview Intelligence is the art of making better hiring data through interview data. Doing interviews (well!) will add to this intelligence and will also let you build on analytics to arrive at the right evaluation to predict, most accurately, the on-job performance. BarRaiser Interview Intelligence and applicant tracking system (ATS) can provide deep analytics. Some basic analytics are also available from job sites. Job marketing platforms provide analytics that shows which job sites have provided candidates.

Building a great corporate culture

Good interviews reflect very well with the candidates and help immensely in building a great culture. A conversation that you (the interviewer) and the candidate (interviewees) both enjoy will make sure that more and more people in your teams will be motivated to perform similarly, leading to a culture of taking the time out for interviews. When creating an effectively structured interview in a corporate culture, there are several things to consider. How can you improve your interviewing culture? You can use BarRaiser’s free structure tool to implement some of these.

Diversity

The biggest asset that a company can have is the diversity of thought – this ensures well-thought-out ideas, better discussions and execution, and more customer-centric outputs. As thoughts can’t be measured, people chose proxies like age, gender, race, etc. to define diversity. When you get to meet more and more people (interviewees) with an outside-in perspective, you expose yourself to that diversity of thought and that will benefit your work directly.

How to save time through effective interviews? (How to find time to do better interviews?)

The activities can be broadly classified into 3 different elements, (i) before the interview, (ii) during the interview, and (iii) after the interview. Here are some practical tips on how to save time on (i) and (iii) while doing (ii) as well. BarRaiser Interview Intelligence can help you along the way (continue reading to see how?).

Before the interview(Preparing for the interview)

Role Requirement

Depending on the role, you should build your interview plan – essentially laying out, WHAT are the different skills that need to be assessed. Make a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves to make sure you can plan your time right.

Once you have arrives at the WHAT, dive deeper into the team working and decide on HOW? The HOW needs to elaborately lay out the discussion technique, question type, sample questions to be asked, and observations that reflect the right attributes.

For example, in consulting interviews problem-solving skills are the WHAT. Consulting teams work closely together and are often hit with only a problem statement with a lot of ambiguity – so case based approach where both the interviewers and interviewee are trying to solve a problem (as a team) is often the approach top consulting firms take.

Sometimes, if the WHATs are quite a few, it’s good to break down the conversation into several rounds of discussion to evaluate the depth of knowledge correctly. Highly recommend not repeating the topics in WHAT among these rounds.

How to prepare an interview plan or structure most efficiently? BarRaiser’s Interview Structure tool lets you plan for this impeccably, with thousands of templates that you can customize, a large question bank to guide you, and best practices from different industries. The best part is, once you have set this, it helps for all candidates and is not something you’d have to refer back to again and again as you will have it in front of you when interviewing (check out During Interview section)

Learn about the Candidate (Interviewee)

To provide a good interview experience and channel the HOWs appropriately, it’s key to dive deeper into the candidate’s experience. Often interviewers find themselves peeking at it last minute and sometimes once they start the interview. Don’t do that else you might find yourself buying time with the ultimate interview cliche – “tell me about yourself”.

How to learn about the candidate quickly? BarRaiser Interview Assistant provides the interviewer with career highlights, social profiles, etc. This is presented so the interviewer can go through it in 5 minutes and also during the interview.

During the Interview (while doing the interview)

Have the interview plan and questions with you

Make sure the interview plan you created is with you, with a set of questions that is relevant to the candidate’s work experience. By doing that candidates feel valued and hence it improves the interview experience. Always keep time checks and stay in control of the conversation so you are able to cover all the topics in time.

How to best plan or structure your interviews? BarRaiser provides an interview assistant that stays with you during the entire interview with the plan and tracks your progress along the same. This way, you stay on course and be more involved in the conversation.

A structured interview with rigorous note-taking

You need to be able to provide fair and objective feedback to the candidate. This makes rigorous and “feedback-oriented” note-taking very important. Feedback-oriented implies notes that can be used directly in the post-interview process.

How to take high-quality and high-impact interview notes efficiently? BarRaiser’s Interview Assistant records and transcribes so you (the interviewer) can stop worrying about note taking and be fully involved in the conversation but still stay on course (‘coz the assistant will intervene if it detects conversations sidetracking!). What’s more, the AI converts the transcription into contextual feedback – which you can just select with a click and all this can be done in real-time during the interview!

Post-Interview (after the interview)

Feedback on the candidate (interviewee)

I am talking about 2 kinds of feedback:

a. To the candidate which should happen more of a Strengths and Areas of Improvement at the end of the interview which helps with the interview experience for the candidate* (Source: BarRaiser’s experience of more than 50,000 interviews).

b. About the candidate to other team members – this is often when interviewers tend to procrastinate and trust me, the longer you wait – the more difficult an objective evaluation will get. Provide feedback almost immediately after the interview (even during if you can).In a study conducted by BarRaiser, we observed that more than 70% of interviewers change their rating on a question when they were shown a recording/transcription of the response! Imagine the impact having this feature can bring on your hiring decisions.

How to provide efficient feedback? BarRaiser records and transcribes the whole interview to help interviewers recall the entire conversation and play it back at the exact location if they want. The feedback can also be provided live during the interview and that too a score and qualitative notes.

Feedback to the interviewer

Interviewer feedback is super important if the interviews are to be done well. The feedback needs to be from the interviewee (candidate) as well as from the organization. Interviewee feedback is often reflective of the conduct of the interviewer, their helpfulness, and their overall impression of the company. Feedback from the organization needs to be more detailed about the interviewing – for example, did the interviewer covers everything in time?, did they submit feedback on time?, did they seem biased towards the candidate?, etc.

How to provide measurable and actionable feedback to the interviewer efficiently? Look up BarRaiser’s Candidate feedback and Ai generated interview quality reports which not only quantify and measure vital interviewing metrics but also coach the interviewers. Interviewer behavior is tracked and interventions are built before, during, and after the interview to improve interview quality.

(Lengthy) debriefs

In case you like a candidate, then there is often the long and sometimes dreaded debriefing meeting. First, it’s difficult to schedule with calendars trying to squeeze in a gazillion things and two, often the interview panelists find themselves running back and forth on their notes.

The best debriefs are the ones that are short and if possible, asynchronous. Post your feedback, and always prepare a brief for yourself that you can carry to the debrief calls.

How to have effective debriefing meetings? First, don’t have’em! BarRaiser lets you collaborate with the candidate asynchronously on the evaluation page. As all the feedbacks (scores + notes) are in one place, it becomes super easy to share your thoughts with each other and provide a hire/no-hire call in just a few clicks!

Conclusion

Once again – Interviews is tough! You should find time to do it nonetheless as it’s also rewarding for your own development! You can employ technology to make you efficient and train interviewers at a fraction of the cost.

Apart from the suggestions in the article above, another very important way of being super efficient is to adopt a model of third-party interview-as-a-service (or hire-an-interviewer) for the initial vetting of candidates.

BarRaiser’s video interview platform with an interview outsourcing plugin can be a great way to hire new employees. This saves time and reduces costs while increasing the interview experience for the candidates and the interviewers. With an experience of over 50K interviews, a smooth interviewing and hiring process is guaranteed.