What’s this?

This is a guide from https://hirehire.ai/ on how to conduct job interviews.

It’s also a guide on where and how we think AI can and cannot help recruiters and hiring managers.

We wrote it for internal use first and let every employee read it. And then we thought, why not open it up to everyone?

We hope it will help everyone who would like to improve their interviewing skills.

In separate sections of the guide, we explain how to prepare for an interview, what to do during the interview itself and immediately after. At the very end, we share thoughts about the general attitude.

Work with the hiring manager to outline the results you expect the new hire to bring. Make sure that we really need a new employee.

There are lots of possible questions and separate guides needed for intake (briefing) sessions but just as a starting point, we usually ask about:

You can also ask ChatGPT (or another model of your choice) to help generate question to ask your hiring manager. Here’s an example of a prompt:

I'm a recruiter and I'm planning to have an intake session with my hiring manager. We're opening the role of a [Product Manager]. Please help me generate questions that I should ask my hiring manager to better define the role.

Describe the skills, values, and qualities a person needs to successfully perform the job at your company. (If you have a competency matrix for the role, it describes exactly these traits)

You will also collaborate with the hiring manager to ensure the list is complete and accurate.

• While there might be a temptation to list 15 different skills and qualities, we believe it's better to select 3—5 most crucial competencies and focus on them.

So, what questions to ask during interviews?

For each skill / value / quality, we formulate a question or several questions that should give us a clear signal on how much a person demonstrates them. Questions like "tell about a situation when you ..." tend to work great.

This can also be done with ChatGPT by uploading the information about your company and job. Example of a prompt:

I'm preparing to interview candidates for the role of the [Product Manager] at [Your Company]. In our conversation with the hiring manager, we have decided that the most important skills and competencies are the following:

- [previous experience building mobile apps]

- [autonomy, taking freedom and responsibility]

- [collaboration with engineering.]

Please help us frame situational questions to assess this competencies at a job interview.

Situational questions are also good because the candidate cannot generate the right answers — these are questions about their specific experience, so ChatGPT won’t help them.

• For some topics , the format of projective questions is more suitable, that is, when we ask the candidate to reflect on someone else, instead of themselves.

• For certain topics, it's useful to ask projective questions. These are questions where we ask the candidate to reflect on someone else, rather than themselves. Reflecting on another person can reduce stress for the candidate and remove the pressure to provide socially approved answers. This approach helps reveal the candidate's hidden opinions and attitudes towards various subjects. Additionally, candidates rarely prepare responses for this type of question.

  • For example: Have you ever worked in a team with an underperformer? Could you describe what made this person underperform? How did it impact the team? What would you suggest the manager do in such a situation?

• Hypothetical questions, such as "imagine that you need to do .... How would you approach this?" are generally less effective. It's more beneficial to ask about the candidate's real experiences and request examples from their past.

• In any situation ask open-ended questions that can't be answered with a simple "yes" or "no". This way, the candidate will be able to give you a lot of important context beyond the direct answer to your question.

• You may also want to supplement each question about a certain situation from past experience with some clarifying questions. For example, using the STAR method: Situation — Target — Action — Result.

Here are a few examples:

Compile the final list of questions for each interview stage, and keep them in view throughout the interview. It's crucial to ask all candidates the same questions with the same wording to ensure equality in the process.

• If the role or company pitch isn't refined, prepare it before interviews. Regardless of a specific interview's outcome, our goal is to engage the candidate and leave a positive impression of the company.

  • Here you can also use ChatGPT, but more as a critic - throw your current pitch there and ask how it could be improved.

• Send the candidate a reminder about the upcoming meeting and include useful materials. These could be links to the company's website or social networks, your LinkedIn profile, or articles about the company. It's a good practice to outline the meeting's agenda or format in this email. This helps the candidate prepare better and increases their confidence.

15 minutes before the interview starts

Settle in, connect, and prepare. At hirehire, we have a flexible approach towards time, and it's acceptable to be slightly late for internal meetings. However, punctuality is crucial for external ones. You should be on the call right on time for the interview.

Familiarize yourself with the candidate: review their CV and portfolio, revisit their cover letter, and previous correspondence with them, or notes from earlier interview stages. Research the companies they have previously worked at or are currently employed with. Check out their posts on LinkedIn.

During the interview

• If the candidate is late, calmly wait for at least 5 minutes, then politely ping them.

• Begin the conversation by thanking the candidate for their time, introducing yourself, and giving a brief overview of the company. You can also spend a few minutes on casual small talk.

• Then explain the structure of the call and its purpose.

  • Out of the 45 minutes for the call, always allocate at least 15 minutes for the candidate's questions and the role pitch. Some interviewers prefer to start with this, while others opt to do it at the end.

• At the end of the interview, you should have detailed notes with the candidate's answers to all questions — this is important in order not to ask the same thing several times, not to mix anything up, to make a balanced fair decision and to remember the candidate after some time.

  • You may use hirehire.ai to get an automatic transcription of the interview.

  • Before starting the transcription, make sure to ask the candidate for explicit permission. You can explain that this is due to the difficulty of manually taking notes and to ensure that no information is lost or mixed up. Most candidates typically agree.

• It's easy to forget that a conversation with a candidate isn't always private. It's important to remember that the candidate could record the call without your knowledge and potentially post it online. So, treat every one-on-one conversation as if it were being live-streamed to the entire internet. If there's something you wouldn't say publicly, don't say it to the candidate.

• A key skill of expert interviewers is asking follow-up questions. They respond to a candidate's answer with clarifying questions, delving deeper into the details.

  • The most effective questions typically start with 'WHAT' and 'HOW'. Asking 'WHY' can sometimes be perceived as confrontational, making the individual defensive, which is the opposite of what we want.

• Feel free to interrupt the candidate if their response is excessively lengthy, off-topic, or filled with unnecessary details.

  • At the beginning of the interview, you can set expectations: "I may occasionally interrupt and ask clarifying questions to get a complete picture."

• Do not hesitate to end the interview early if you realize that the candidate is not at all suitable due to some obvious criteria, such as openness to relocation. It's crucial to explicitly state the reason why continuing the interview would be a waste of time for both of you. Of course, it's important to thank the candidate for their response and offer them other relevant roles, if available.

• The primary goal is to get as accurate assessment of a specific competence as possible — the extent of their understanding of what they're doing, and their ability to do it independently.

• An experienced interviewer is somewhat of a psychologist. Our job is to uncover what truly matters to a candidate and what might influence their decision to switch jobs. For instance, if a candidate answers, "There was no challenge, it was boring" to the question "Why did you leave your previous companies?", there might be more to it. They could have been overlooked for promotion for five years, for example.

  • Determine the candidate's needs and incorporate them into your pitch. For example, if they value ongoing training, you may address it: "Our company budgets for personal development and hosts internal conferences regularly..."

  • Ask a person to list and rank their criteria for choosing a new job. Each point can be explored further. For instance, if "great team" is a criterion, ask for a definition, past examples, and why it's important.

• Towards the end of the call, discuss the next steps, explaining how the interview process will proceed and what other stages the candidate can expect. Be sure to discuss the deadlines for when you will provide the candidate with feedback.

• At the very end, it's worth thanking the candidate for the meeting again. You may encourage them to write you if they remember any important questions that they did not ask, or want to share additional information about themselves.

After the interview

• Store your notes and a scorecard in your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or a spreadsheet. It's a good practice to clearly note any potential biases you may have towards or against this candidate.

• Formulate your conclusion clearly and unambiguously — whether to continue with this candidate for the position or not.

• As soon as possible, send your scorecard to the hiring manager or the next interviewer. Ideally, this should be done immediately while the memories and impressions from the interview are still fresh.

  • If we have a transcription of the interview, a draft scorecard can also be generated using AI — for example, with hirehire.ai. This draft can save up to 30 minutes of work.

• The candidate should be clearly informed and directed towards the next steps — we think, this should be done the following day. Worth setting a reminder!

• Provide honest feedback to candidates who have been rejected. Ensure that your feedback does not come across as criticism, but rather highlights areas for development. This can help the candidate succeed in future interviews for similar roles. It's crucial to maintain legal correctness in this process, as in some countries, a candidate could potentially challenge your decision in court based on your email.

  • This is where we wouldn’t trust ChatGPT to write an email — the tone of voice is likely going to be off.

Attitude

• Regardless of the interview outcome, we believe it's crucial to feel sincere gratitude to the person on the other end of the call. They have devoted 30-60-90 minutes of their life to a meeting to share about themselves and to learn more about us.

• During interviews, our goal is to understand each other better. It's not an examination for the candidate or a sales pitch for the role, although it can have elements of both. Regardless of the candidate's level, from juniors to top managers, you're not of a higher or lower status. We advise communicating as equals—respectfully, warmly, and openly.

• As an interviewer, it's crucial to remember your responsibility for timing and structuring the conversation. Your task is to exchange as much information as possible with the candidate in a limited time. Therefore, we advise against starting the interview with a request for the candidate to "tell about yourself." This approach risks losing control of the conversation, not gathering the necessary information, and wasting time.

• Even if a candidate may not be suitable for a specific role, they might be a good fit for another, including future positions. We want to create warm professional relationships with every single candidate, and our call is the first step towards this.

Thank you for reading. If you have any feedback, questions, or comments, please send them to hello@hirehire.ai. We read all emails and greatly appreciate your input.

Huge thanks to the kind souls who helped make this text better: Polina Abushek, Maria Chugunova, Natalia Diyak, Ekaterina Titova, Tatiana Tolstykh, Daria Zueva. We love you!