Interviews: How To Write Interview Plans Like A Recruitment God

Backdrop

First let's address the elephant in the room: Most hiring managers aren't very good at interviewing.

Some will even admit it.

They possibly know what they need to do to prepare for one properly, but the work and time required to do so stops most from doing it.

Instead, they'll often wing an interview, taking an ad-hoc approach and going through a candidate's CV asking "tell me about your time at..." and not using any real structure or prescribed plan.

The problem with that is that the process becomes subjective and all about gut feel, rather than a fair, objective process that assesses the candidate's ability to do the role and culture fit.

That's why we created the Interview Planner tool for TalentKoala.

It's objective is to provide hiring managers with a prescribed plan for every interview, with questions and model answers outlined, even creating competency interviews to help them fully understand the candidate's ability to do the job.

Getting started

To create an interview plan in TalentKoala, upload your job description.

From there the system will analyse the role you're looking to recruit and will suggest how many stages it thinks you need to be running.

You can edit the stages or swap them around if required.

If you've selected the in-depth interview, you'll then be asked how you want that interview to be made up using a number of toggles:

  • Values questions (to assess culture fit)
  • Competency questions (to assess specific competency fit)
  • Techincal questions (to assess skills fit)
  • Motivation questions (to test commitment to the role)

If you've selected the Values Questions option, you'll then be asked to list the values that are important to the hiring company.

And if you've selected the Competenecy Questions option, TalentKoala will suggest four competencies that it thinks needs to be assessed based on the role you're looking to hire. It will also suggest four reserve competencies which you can include in the competencies to be assessed by clicking on any of them.

You can also remove any selected competency by clicking on it, or you can add your own by clicking on the '+' icon next to them.

Once you're happy with your selected competencies, hit the next button and your interview plans are written for you.

Editing the plans

You can navigate through each plan by using the menu at the top.

You're able to edit each question and answer as you see fit, and you can move the order around to suit.

When you're happy with how the questions read and the order that they're in, you can export them to a PDF by clicking on the 'Export PDF' button at the top of the screen.

At this stage you'll be asked which brand you want your export to be created in.

Select the right brand and your interview plan is downloaded to your Downloads folder on your machine.