Recruitment interviewing

Hello, and welcome to this session on Recruitment Interviewing. My name is Neil Morrison, I'm the Director of Strategy, Culture and Innovation at Penguin Random House, UK and a board member at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

In this session we're going to look at a number of different areas around recruitment interviewing. Starting off with the simple question, why interview in the first place? Secondly, moving on to getting the environment right, both in terms of the physical environment and the situational setting. Then we'll look at asking effective questions and which questions to ask and perhaps which ones not to. We'll look at how you can take steps to minimize bias in your recruitment interviewing. We'll look at how to create a great candidate experience, and finally, finish with my five top tips.

So, let's start off with a very simple question, why bother interviewing in the first place? And often the answer is simply, well, we've got a vacancy and we need to fill it, but what I'd suggest is that, recruitment interviewing is effectively looking at the appraisal of investment. What we're saying is, how can we find a person who'll perform the task that we need doing, the best of all? And are we willing to invest in that person over a period of time? And the reason this is important, is it can help us think about, in some ways, the seriousness of interviewing and the importance of approaching it in a slightly more structured way than sometimes happens; Because we need to recognize that interviewing is imperfect but there are steps we can take to make it better. And there have been a number of studies that looked at the factors that can be used to improve quality of interviewing and to improve the likelihood of making a successful hire. So simply, one of the main findings is that designing questions around the job related requirements and asking them in an organized and structured way, can actually increase the validity of the hire by about twice. So, you can double your chance of making a successful hire just by making sure that the questions are structured and they're based firmly around the job. Likewise, studies have also shown that unstructured interviews tend to favor candidates who perhaps have better social skills, and personality, and have a level of social polish, whereas structured questions based on the job tend to test cognitive ability. The other part about recruitment interviewing that we need to remember is that it's also a chance for the candidate to understand whether they want to work for the company, and each interview is a brand interaction; So, if we want to create the best environment and if we can, through that interview, create the best environment, then even if that candidate isn't successful and doesn't join us, they go away feeling positive about our organization, feeling positive about the company that we work for, and talking to other people potentially about that positive experience and interaction.