Does Your Interview Process Need a Makeover? Here Are 8 of the Best Interviewing Tips by Companies with High Glassdoor Ratings

Guest blog from Terkel.io

From gathering quality candidate feedback to streamlining your efforts, here are eight answers to the question, “Can you share your most effective tips for improving a company’s interview process?”

Publish Candidate Feedback
Start Out With a Personal Anecdote, Be Human
Focus on Behavioral Interviewing
Use Structured Interviews and Scorecards
Leave Room for Creativity
Leverage Innovation With AI Solutions
Include Open-Ended, Divergent Questions
Keep Things Simple

Publish Candidate Feedback

For improving a company’s interview process, one uncommon tip is to focus on the candidate’s experience. Many companies overlook this key element and cannot recognize how their hiring process affects the perception of their brand.

Giving candidates an easy way to provide feedback about their own journey and find out what improvements we could make can show potential employers that your commitment extends beyond the actual hire. By doing this, you’ll not only set yourself apart from other businesses with higher Glassdoor ratings, but also give yourself a better understanding of where improvements need to be made in order to build a more effective interviewing process.

Tasia Duske, CEO, Museum Hack

Start Out With a Personal Anecdote, Be Human

I’ve always found that a good interview is a two-way street and should be a dialogue rather than an interrogation. Try it — you can put your interviewees at ease by starting the interview off with a personal story.

This can be about anything just so long as it tells them a little about you as a person. This gives them a starting point in seeing you as a person, rather than the arbiter of their fate with being hired at this company or not. It is a simple way to make the interview experience easier for the interviewee and give them a more positive impression, even if they don’t get the job.

Dragos Badea, CEO, Yarooms

Focus on Behavioral Interviewing

As part of a SaaS company with an overall rating of 4.7 out of 5.0 on Glassdoor, we want to give you a hack on improving your interview process. Focus as much as you can on behavioral interview questions.

We all know the best indicator of future performance is experience. The format of behavioral interviews forces candidates to speak specifically about their experiences, giving the interviewer a clear understanding of how they would perform in the future. Even if the candidate is relatively inexperienced, you can ask them behavioral questions on their soft skills.

These questions will help you understand the applicants and their experience better and recruit the top talent.

Madhurima Halder, Content Manager, Recruit CRM

Use Structured Interviews and Scorecards

Structured job interviews might sound rigid, but they help prevent bias and establish fairer hiring practices. Interview scorecards give you a simple, standardized set of criteria you can easily follow as you ask questions about hard or soft skills, experience, and cultural fit.

Only the “must-have” key criteria should be included on a scorecard to maximize value, while minimizing time spent during the process. Some candidates may find structured interviews impersonal, so it’s critical to explain the process — and your reasoning for using it — long before the interview takes place.

While some employers are hesitant to send out their scorecards ahead of time, it’s relatively easy to weed out the “fakes” through assessments and references. You’ll give those candidates that might not traditionally interview well the chance to prepare, calm their nerves, and bring a more authentic self to the interview.

Maximilian Wühr, Cgo and Co-founder, FINN

Leave Room for Creativity

In designing an effective interview process, creativity and innovation are key. For certain roles that require a mix of operational and strategic thinking, a presentation or panel-style approach is used.

This allows a candidate to go beyond normal interview questions to show their unique side and thinking. It gives the interview team a chance to see how they synthesize the information they were given and what they do with it. Additionally, it establishes a standardized process, ensuring that all candidates receive the same level of attention and consideration.

Tony Deblauwe, VP Human Resources, Celigo

Leverage Innovation With AI Solutions

With a Glassdoor rating of 5, Affinda is quite popular with employees. And one reason candidates who are a part of our recruitment process are happy with every stage is its quick and seamless structure.

This we owe to the AI solutions our HR personnel put to work at every step. A recruitment process can be as tiring for candidates as for an HR team, especially with all the overwhelming documentation.

We have found our AI-driven solutions, ranging from resume and job description parsing to resume redactors and candidate screening software, taking over the mundane throughout the process. This leaves our HR team with more time for crucial tasks.

The ease of the process impacts our candidates too, who now find the entire cycle quick and efficient. This results in a great first impression on our interview candidates, a.k.a. our future employees. They discover right away how it would be to work for a company that doesn’t just preach AI and tech, but onboards every advanced solution, too.

Brendan McGreevy, Head of Strategy, Affinda

Include Open-Ended, Divergent Questions

Our interview process, while thorough, involves open-ended, divergent questions to assess their company fit and soft skills more effectively. These questions focus on opening discussions on workplace matters, such as communication, collaboration, and accountability.

There are no right or wrong answers at this interview stage, and we encourage candidates to speak as honestly as possible. It provides valuable insights into how they handle common issues at work. We set a more conversational tone to make the environment feel more relaxed for the candidates. It promotes a smoother two-way discussion for more genuine responses.

Grant Polachek, Head of Branding, SquadHelp

Keep Things Simple

We put in a lot of effort to improve our interview processes and hire over 300 people here at Belkins, and the two things that helped us the most were:

#1: Simpler job descriptions
#2: Interview surveys

A lot of companies like to publish these broad, detailed job descriptions, but our data shows that this approach overcomplicated the process a lot. Instead, we made our job descriptions simple and straight to the point, where almost every element was advertised as a must-have for the interview process.

This helped improve the quality of our interviews and sped up the entire process. Surveys were an amazing addition as well, and once we started collecting essential data about our interview process, we could recognize and fill up the gaps and thoroughly improve our processes. Incorporate pre- and post-interview surveys to collect key information.

Michael Maximoff, Co-founder and Managing Partner, Belkins