Interviewing Skills

Course Overview:

The interview is a common tool for employee selection. However, many interviewers have never been trained and it has long been recognized that the common method of interviewing does not really tell us much about a person’s behavior, competencies or level of Emotional Intelligence when faced with difficult and sometimes challenging situations.

Competency/behavior-based Interviewing is a very reliable and valid candidate selection technique. While we may say that past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior, we do not act as though we believe this when we are interviewing candidates – often because we are not certain how to ask questions that will tell us about past performance.

In this workshop we will address the importance of preparing a list of required competencies, the scenarios that can reveal whether the candidate has these competencies, as well as how to rate them. Participants will practice the pre-interview preparation, developing questions and their value, the interview techniques that get specific, behavior-based examples of past performance, and the strategies that follow through from this process.

Learning Objectives:

• Build on existing interview skills, specifically by developing a competency-based approach
• Understand interviewing skills and techniques including active listening, probing, questioning, reading non-verbal clues or body language
• Evaluate the strengths and limitations of different interview approaches
• Understand the principles and benefits of competency-based interviews
• Practice the approach in simulated competency-based interviews
• Develop effective interview questions in alignment with job requirements and selection criteria
• Review the types of questions that lead to the retrieval of more of the candidates’ ‘real’ experience and competencies
• Practice writing interview questions based on a competency model
• Be able to develop a systematic means of collecting and analyzing behavioral data to support a competency-based evaluation of candidates
• Systematically use information from competency-based interviews to evaluate candidates’ suitability for the positions they are considered for
• Identify the obstacles to conducting a fair and objective assessment when interviewing and suggest ways to mitigate them
• Assess the candidates and make recommendations