Video:How to Interview a Job Candidate

Transcript:How to Interview a Job Candidate

Hi, I'm Michelle Tillis Lederman, the author of "The 11 Laws of Likability" and the founder of Executive Essentials, a company that provides communication and leadership programs. Today for About.com, I'm going to give you tips on how to interview a job candidate.

Tips for How to Interview a Candidate

Before you think about what questions to ask a candidate, you want to think about what would be successful in that role. And that's the ABCs of the job description: The Attributes, Behaviors and Characteristics that you think will be successful in that role.

Instructions for How to Interview a Candidate

Once you have that vision and that list then you can develop our questions. You are going to focus mainly on Behavior based questions. Behavior based interviewing is based on the premise that past behavior is the best indicator of future performance and has been shown to be the most effective way to hire right.So, for example, you are looking someone with initiative. You may ask them: "Can you tell me about a time in your past job where you had to show initiative?" Hypotheticals are another way to ask questions. For candidates that have less experience you will use Hypothetical questions because they don't have as many stories from their past to talk about. So you might ask questions like: "If you were dealing with a very angry customer, how would you handle it?" Now the challenge of hypothetical questions is they might be looking for what you want to hear or what they believe the right answer may be and it may not be how they would actually act in the situation.

So your best approach is actually a blended combination. Sometimes you want to look for the same characteristic by using both Behavioral and Hypothetical questions.When you are evaluating a response, the acronym that you can look for is C-A-R. The three components are: C – Circumstance (What is the situation, task or obstacle that they were faced with?); A – Action (What action did they take?); and, R is for Results. You want to know the results. Are they happy with it? Would they do something different next time? This is where you can really probe a little deeper on how they acted so you can see if it's a fit for this position. While you are listening, you are also going to look at their body language, their eye contact, etc. How are their communication skills because that is critical in any job? You can take these results, compare them to your ABCs and see if they're the right candidate for the job.

I'm Michelle. Thanks for watching and if you want to learn more go to About.com.