Interviews are an essential part of any recruitment and selection process and defined in the dictionary as “a formal meeting at which someone is asked questions in order to find out if they are suitable for a post of employment”
Whilst this is a fairly simplistic definition its principle remains but recruiters have developed and evolved numerous complex interviewing methodologies to aid the decision-making process for interviewers. What are the most common methods used by human resources and hiring managers and what are the future trends looking like?
Competency Based Interviews.
This methodology is popular in large companies and government departments and involves having a pre-determined set of competencies that relate to a specific job role and may include elements like leadership or people management for example. Candidates must complete and submit questionnaires prior to interview where they are expected to provide real life examples that demonstrate that competency. The interviews are then structured fairly rigidly around the answers provided in the pre-submitted questionnaire application. Whist these types of interviews can be inflexible they do provide a level playing field for candidates and are ideally suited to large organisations that recruit high volumes of candidates.
STAR and Its Variants.
Developed by the recruiting industry academics over many years these interviewing methodologies have been widely used for some time and can be adopted in a formal way where the interviewer expressly requires interview answers in a specific format or can be adopted by candidates to help them convey the information pertinent to that job role. These acronyms stand for:
- STAR – Situation, Tasks, Actions, Results
- SOAR – Situation, Obstacles, Actions, Results
- CAR – Challenge, Action, Result
- PAR – Problem Action Result
For both candidates and recruiters there are just too many of these acronyms and there can be issues when looking as specific definitions where the word situation, obstacle or problem can mean the same thing. Recruiting managers who prefer to set a specific interview style brief to candidates should at least provide examples and keep the process simple without over complicating matters. For candidates it will pay dividends to develop their own set of answers that can be related to these questions because it will illustrate how they differ from other candidates and shows how they can add value by demonstrating what they’ve done in the past.
Recorded Interviews.
This is a style of interview that has developed out of remote interviewing and for hiring managers does not even require their presence. Pre-set questions are sent to candidates and they simply provide video answers in a specific format and time. These are then submitted and the recruiter can browse candidate’s answers as and when it’s convenient. Although this is a rather impersonal approach it can save recruiters time and candidates can craft their answers.
Whichever method is preferred by recruiters and hiring managers each can be tweaked to suit their requirements. These rigid interview formats work well for high volume recruitment campaigns and lower-level positions. The more senior or specialised the open role is the more personalised the interviewing technique should be and is prevalent in the digital tech start up sector when recruiting new digital talent for example. Interviewing high volumes of candidates can be avoided by using hiring tools to select the most relevant talent for interview reducing the need for rigid structured interviewing to narrow down a talent pool.
One such company who are game changing the face of recruitment by providing a robust process to ensure more efficient recruitment using any channel is Hire Digital, a start-up recruitment company with a global presence that has invested heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manage the digital tech recruitment process. Their talent management software platform gives digital talent recruiters a strict criterion for posting job adverts and descriptions and their AI works in such a way that it generates a much smaller more targeted candidate list by using up to 40,000 attributes. They key to this is efficiency, recruiters spend less time generating job advertisements and trawling through hundreds of CV’s to get their shortlist, Hire Digital tech can rapidly access up to 1bn talent globally.
Hire Digital is an AI technology with a human touch that is completely revolutionising the recruitment and selection process. It’s two times faster, 50 % cheaper and ten times more accurate than traditional hiring tech. To find out more speak to Robin Brohl at Hire Digital he is a real person and would love to engage with you and help you streamline your recruitment processes.