How to prepare for your upcoming interview

You have an interview coming up soon. Here are some best practices you can use to feel prepared, fight common interviewer biases and hire a talented person to join your team!

⚠️ Pyn note to HR: This message is intended for interviewers and should be updated to reflect your interview practices and processes.

The day before the interview 

Review the job description and hiring criteria

Review the job description and confirm the skills and qualifications needed for the role and how you should assess them. 

Setting clear expectations ahead of time means you are less likely to adjust criteria to fit a particular candidate, which can give them an unfair advantage. 

Familiarize yourself with the interview questions and score cards

Being prepared and asking the same questions of every candidate means you’re providing a good candidate experience, giving each candidate an opportunity to be successful, and allows you to easily compare how well candidates meet the criteria for the role. 

If any of the hiring criteria, interview questions or score cards are unclear, ask the hiring manager questions such as:

• What skills should I evaluate the candidate on?
• What are the must-have versus nice-to-have skills or experience?
• How should I rate the candidate’s skills?

During the interview 

Frame the interview

Start the interview by putting the candidate at ease. Explain the interview structure, including the kinds of questions you will ask, how you’ll be taking notes, and how long the interview is and if there will be any breaks. 

Introduce yourself and the role

Give some background about you and your role, how long you have worked here, and how your role relates to the position they are interviewing for.

Explain why the role they’re interviewing for is important to the company’s mission and objectives. Talk about the company culture, the team dynamic, and what you enjoy about working here.

Interview questions and scoring

The bulk of the interview will be structured interview questions that help you determine whether the candidate fulfills the criteria for the role. As best you can, take notes and score each question as you go along documenting in as much detail as possible. This helps you to more accurately assess the candidate instead of relying on your memory post-interview. If you need to look down or at a screen to take notes, just let the candidate know so they understand they still have your attention.

Leave about 10 minutes at the end of the interview for the candidate to ask you questions. 

After the interview 

Enter your feedback and ratings immediately

Enter your feedback and ratings as soon as possible. If you are part of an interview panel, enter your feedback prior to talking to other interviewers. 

Whether intentional or not, we can easily influence how others rate a candidate just by sharing our impressions. So, capturing your feedback right away and before talking to others about the candidate leads to higher quality assessments and prevents groupthink in hiring decisions.

Interview Tips

• Practice active listening. Summarize what the candidate said and say “tell me more about that.” It’s okay to ask them to repeat and clarify themselves: “That’s a great example – to help me understand more fully, could you clarify what your role was in this example?”
• Give the candidate your attention. Whenever possible, turn off notifications and find a place to do the interview that will minimize distractions.
• Ask open questions. Open questions are questions that don’t have yes or no answers. Ask the candidate “why does this position interest you?” as opposed to “does this position interest you?” to get more detailed responses.
• Avoid asking questions regarding a candidate’s family, marital status, age, or religion. Depending on your location, these questions are not legal to ask a candidate.  If a candidate mentions something in one of these categories, it’s alright to acknowledge their comment and then return to the interview questions.
• Refer questions about compensation to Talent Acquisition. 
• Exploring employment history. If there is a gap in employment history on a resume that you’d like to learn more about, you may ask the candidate what they did during that time to keep their skills current. You may not ask why they were absent from work. It may be related to a medical or family issue, which is protected information.