The wonderful world of small business

Holding job interviews for new members of staff can be a daunting prospect for a small business owner who has little or no experience of the process – but if your small business is growing, the chances are that you will need to hold job interviews sooner or later.

Perfect interviews are all in the planning

It might seem like an obvious thing to point out, but the secret to finding the best new member for your team starts long before you hold interviews. Choosing a new member of staff has to begin with defining what skills and attributes you need in your organisation, so make a list of what you need from the perfect candidate – they must have experience of ‘x,y and z’; they must have ‘x’ qualifications. Then make a list of ‘nice to have’ (things that would be good, but aren’t essential in the role) – additional knowledge of ‘a’; qualification ‘b’, etc. You should be using these lists to write your advertising and also the job specification for the new position, these will help you to attract the right candidates for interviews because the advert will describe the role and what the essential and desirable skills are.

On to the interviews

Now you should be at the stage of preparing for your interviews and here are a few tips to make the day as stress free and productive as possible.

1. Prepare a separate job specification for each interview.
You’ll need to make notes on how each person meets the criteria you’ve set – make a couple of sheets which list the main criteria for the role and give yourself some space to write down the facts given by the candidate. Don’t forget to put the candidates name and date of interview on the sheet!!

2. Get the setting right.
The old days of a big desk, you at one end and the candidate at the other are long gone. You and the candidate need to be comfortable and relaxed – you’ll only get the best out of an interview if you both are. Look at the room and how it’s set out – get rid of big physical barriers between people; make sure the room is light and cool and make sure that you have refreshments available.

3. Be relaxed and communicate clearly.
You’re not trying to scare the life out of the candidate, it will achieve nothing other than making them more nervous and less likely to talk, so don’t do it. Be fairly relaxed (don’t go too far, it is a formal interview) and just talk to the person clearly, asking them what you want to know about.

4. Use open questions.
If you ask someone ‘Can you operate this machine?’, chances are they’ll reply ‘Yes’ – which isn’t much use to you. Ask them ‘Can you tell me how you would operate this machine?’ and it gives them the chance to describe and discuss what they know – this can tell you far more about them than a simple yes or no answer. Make sure most of your questions are open and allow the person to talk, if they can’t talk about it, they’re either very nervous (this should be obvious and you can make allowances for it) or perhaps they don’t know quite as much as they’ve said on their CV.

5. Let the candidate ask questions.
At the end of the interview, once you have all the important information you need written down, ask the candidate if there’s anything they’d like to know about the job and start a conversation with something like ‘so what do you when you’re not at work?’ It’s a nice icebreaker and hopefully it should give you some insight into what interests and hobbies the candidate has – these can be good pointers as to whether they like to work alone, in teams, etc.

6. Give yourself time.

A very common mistake is to arrange interview slots that are too close together.  A typical interview would last between 30 and 60 minutes (depending on the role), so don’t schedule them to start every half an hour.  I would suggest a minimum of a 45 minute window for each interview – if the interviews are a bit shorter, it gives you time to stretch your legs or catch up on a few emails and it also means that the candidates aren’t sitting somewhere waiting, wondering how unprofessional the rest of your company is!!  This all adds to the relaxed, calm approach that’s necessary and minimises the mild panic that shows through when you’re under the pressure of running late.

It’s pretty easy to write a whole  book about interviewing and many people have, but hopefully, we’ve given a few hints and tips that should make things that little bit easier.  And don’t forget, the more you do something, the better you’ll get at doing it! If you’ve got any other tips you’d like to share, do let us know in the comments below.

Tags: business start-ups, hiring new staff, small business management

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Small business management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.