Interview Skills You Should Brush Up On to Succeed!

As companies move forward during The Great Resignation, they need to hire the right employees. This requires effective interview skills.

It takes a significant amount of time for a hiring manager and HR to discuss the job requirements, source and screen candidates, and conduct interviews. It also takes time to conduct background checks, finalize the candidate selections, and wait for candidates to accept offers and begin working.

As a result, hiring managers should participate in training now to refresh their interview skills. This helps build candidate pipelines for current and future hiring needs.

Discover some benefits of hiring managers brushing up on their interview skills and topics to discuss during training.

Advantages of Refreshing Interview Skills

Proving a refresher for hiring managers’ interview skills training lets them practice in a safe environment. Because these managers may not have conducted interviews for a significant time, a mini session would be advantageous.

Refresher training ensures hiring managers and HR are on the same page regarding interviewing. This increases success in hiring the best candidates.

Topics to Discuss When Refreshing Interview Skills

Intake meeting: Talk about the meeting between the hiring manager and HR to discuss the job requirements and sourcing strategy. For instance, emphasize the importance of the candidate experience throughout the hiring process. Also, discuss specific ways to show commitment to diversity and inclusion so candidates feel they are welcome and can be themselves at work.

Discussing the intake meeting ensures the hiring manager and HR are following the same policies and procedures for interviewing. This speeds up the hiring process, increasing the likelihood of hiring top candidates.

Interview questions: Emphasize the importance of asking effective, compliant behavioral interview questions. These questions provide insight into a candidate’s experience.

You may want to use the STAR method to create interview questions. This involves asking a candidate about a situation they encountered, the task they needed to accomplish, the action they took, and the results they attained.

Ensure the hiring manager asks follow-up questions to gather enough detail for a complete picture of the situation, task, action, and result. This helps provide the necessary information to make a hiring decision.

Candidate selection: Remind hiring managers to look past their unconscious biases when choosing the best candidate. This can be accomplished through an online training program that may be included in your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.

Need Help with Hiring?

Refreshing hiring managers’ interview skills ensures managers and HR are on the same page throughout the hiring process. Sharing details about the intake meeting, interview questions, and the candidate selection process increases the likelihood of hiring the most qualified candidates.

For additional help with hiring, partner with Casey Accounting & Finance Resources. Get started today.

Behavioral Interview – Are You Ready?

Do you have a behavioral interview scheduled with a company that might hire you for an available position? If so, there is no reason to stress about the interview, or downright fear it either.

Many people worry about behavioral interviews, because they don’t know what to expect. Companies and recruiters are using behavioral interviews more often to determine which candidate might be the best for the available position. Why? Because past behavior could lead to future behavior.

Here’s some expert insight into behavioral interviews, so you can confidently handle them if and when they come up in your job search process.

What Happens During a Behavioral Interview?

You might be wondering what happens during a behavioral interview. First off, the interviewer will ask you to describe a situation in which you had to deal with a difficult co-worker who was not pulling their weight on a project or ask about another situation at a previous job. The interviewer will want you to explain the situation and how you handled it without generalizations or theorizing the issue. The interviewer will likely take notes, and you might not be able to discuss any stories you might have prepared.

How to Prepare for a Behavioral Interview

The next step here is to prepare for a behavioral interview as much as possible, in order to succeed the next time you have a job interview scheduled. The following steps are how you should prepare for a behavioral interview:

  • Think about past experiences that show leadership, teamwork, planning, education, customer service and more from your career.
  • Prepare to describe the situation, the action you took and how the situation came to a conclusion. An easy way to remember this is with the STAR acronym – situation, task, action and results.
  • Have short descriptions of each situation prepared, and have details ready in the event that the interviewer asks for them.
  • Make sure the outcome of the situation reflects positively on you, even if the overall outcome was negative.
  • Never generalize about these events. Be as specific as possible.
  • Never leave out any details, or embellish true ones, because the interviewer will be able to find out what is true and what is false.

Avoid Short Answers

Do your best to avoid giving interviewers short answers when taking part in a behavioral interview. Short answers give the impression that either you are not prepared, or you do not have any experience with the type of situation the interviewer is asking you about in your career. Both of these could lead the interviewer to remove you from consideration for the job, especially if the position requires you to handle tough situations with co-workers or subordinates. The more you offer in the answer, the better the interviewer can understand what type of worker and problem solver you have been in the past.

There is absolutely no reason to fear the behavioral interview, especially if you have had to deal with tough situations in the past. Just follow the tips above and you will shine in any interview.

Casey Accounting & Finance Resources, a winner of Inavero’s Best of Staffing® Client Award for the second consecutive year, can help your company meet all of its financial staffing needs. Contact our award-winning team today to get started!