How to Conduct a Successful Interview and Assessment After Interview Example
Post-interview assessments are on the rise, and we're here to tell you why. The old fashioned ways of finding talent like resume reviews take too much time and often result in unreliable hiring decisions. More than 70% of resumes tend to be inaccurate, and this is showing no sign of changing soon.
It can be challenging to find the right person for a specific position. You could have an impressive resume that is a strong contender, but you want someone who is perfect for your job in particular.
It's hard to find top talent and that's why organizations need new tools to evaluate candidates in-depth. The hiring assessment is a great way to make sure the candidate will be a perfect fit for the job.
This article will provide you with tips on how to properly conduct an assessment after interviewing someone for a position within their company.
Why should you conduct a post-interview assessment?
It is important to conduct a post-interview assessment to make sure that what you have learned from the interview is accurate. It also helps you to identify any potential problems and find out more about the candidate's culture fit.
When you have many positive candidates to choose from, a post-interview assessment can help you narrow down candidates and find the candidate for best fit.
Benefits of conducting post-interview assessments
Reduce hiring biases
The purpose of post-interview assessments can be to combat the biases in our selections.
For example, if an interviewer prefers a candidate because they are a member of their own gender or race, that may lead to bias against other candidates.
If the interviewer can't assess their own biases, it may be more difficult for them to select the most qualified candidate which could lead to future problems with the interviewers self -fulfilling prophecy.
Improving your recruitment process
Ultimately, if you are following a post-interview assessment process you are giving each candidate a fair and equal chance at the role. This means that the very best candidates are selected which yields better results for your recruitment success.
Reduce recruitment costs
By selecting employees who are the right fit, you are reducing costs associated with hiring unfit candidates.
Allows for diversity
By assessing your interviews based on skills, qualifications, personality and experience needed you will find that you select candidates based on gaps in the team. This means each employee has a unique purpose. Therefore their diversity is their strength. A diverse team can bring a lot of value to your company.
Growing company skillset
Assessments ensure the skill set of your employees is continually growing and benefiting the company.
Ensuring successful roles
When you have a successful assessment process you can safely rely on getting the best candidates for the role. This is especially important for leadership roles. Choosing great leaders leads to building and driving teams to success.
What Happens During the Assessment After the Interview Process?
The post-interview assessment is a crucial stage of the recruitment process. The assessment should include a number of tests and tasks to determine whether the candidate is suitable for the role.
These tests are designed to measure the skills and abilities required for the position in question. They are also designed to assess how well candidates can work in teams, solve problems, and communicate with others.
The Proper Way to Conduct an Assessment After Interview
1. Create your candidate criteria
To make assessments more consistent, it's important to first establish what kind of candidates your organization is looking for. This lets you use the same evaluation criteria for each candidate.
For each role, you should begin by defining the core responsibilities of the job. This can include the skills that are needed for the position. Also the education and professional experience.
You should then think about what kind of person would be best suited for this position. For example, someone who's comfortable working on their own or someone who needs a lot of face-to-face interaction with their coworkers.
To make sure that your candidate criteria are as good as possible, it's important to plan ahead and think about how you want your company culture to be reflected in your hiring process.
For example, if you want employees who are creative and innovative, then your selection process should reflect that by looking for people who have these qualities on their resumes or cover letter. You should combine this with reflecting on the answers candidates gave you when you asked behaviour based questions.
2. Develop your process for assessment after the interview
The interviewer needs to have a process for assessing the interviewee. This process should include:
- Assessing the interviewee's responses and comments
- Looking at the interviewee’s body language and nonverbal cues.
- Reviewing the interviewee’s resume
- Checking the the interviewee’s references
- Evaluating how well the interview went.
Types of assessments that can be used include:
Behaviour assessments
You can use a scoring matrix to score candidate answers on their behaviours. To effectively do this, you need to ask behavioural-based interview questions. These are questions that ask for real-life examples of when a candidate could demonstrate a personality trait or skill.
Personality assessments
Personality assessments are assessments that provide you with insights into how well a candidate would fit the culture of your company. This allows them to extract the best candidate for your team.
Skill assessments
Skill assessments, or evaluative tests, can help you pick the right employees. They show how candidates would apply their skills in real-world contexts.
Background checks
A background check will tell you if the candidate has any criminal or negative financial history that would disqualify them for certain positions that need security clearance or finance roles.
Employment and education verification/ references
Additionally, you can do a little research to verify the authenticity of any candidate's employment and education records.
3. Compare your candidates
The first thing to do for assessment after the interview is to make a comparison between all your candidates. To easily do this you should break down your comparisons into four distinct areas:
Rank the candidates
The first step to conducting an assessment after the interview is to create a list of all the interviewees in order of their performance. You can follow an interview scoring matrix otherwise known as the hiring matrix, interview scorecard or interview rubric.
Compare candidate answers
The second step is to compare the interviewee’s answers with what they said in their resume. This will give you a sense of how honest they are and if they are being truthful about their qualifications, specialities, experience and accomplishments.
Evaluate candidate answers, composure, body language and personality
Third, you should assess and evaluate the interviewee’s responses to your questions as well as how they acted during the interview.
Why you should carry out a post Interview survey
A post-interview survey is a way to get feedback and insights from your interviewees. It is to understand what they liked about the interview process and what they didn't like. It can also help you understand how you can improve your interview process for future interviews.
The post-interview survey also allows the interviewer to get feedback on their performance. As well as provide them with an opportunity to ask any questions that were not answered in the interview.
You can get an example of a candidate feedback survey here.
Implementing an assessment after an interview example
Through an assessment, you'll know for sure which of your candidates is the best fit for the position. Post-interview assessments can be helpful when filtering a large applicant pool of candidates.
By using many assessments including the behavioural scoring matrix you’ll easily assess which candidates to put forward for the role. Your decision is made on consistent, fair and easy to measure results.
This will also be able to act as a great feedback tool for successful and unsuccessful candidates. If you are ready to evaluate candidates today and improve your hiring decision you should consider the use of video interviewing.
Video interviewing is a great way to have a copy of your interviews which you can share with other hiring managers and rewatch over and over again.
This makes the interview assessment easy and doesn’t rely on your memory of the interview. This can be an especially important factor in your assessment. As you’ll be able to remember the first and last interview more easily, some of the interviews in between may be harder to recall. To find out more about video interviewing check out our app here.