Top Interview Errors: How to Make a Hiring Mistake

It’s well-documented that a bad hire can have a huge negative impact on any business. From increased recruitment and training costs to losing valuable clients, avoiding a hiring mistake will save your business time and money.

The interview is generally the most challenging part of the recruitment process for the employer, and the most critical part to get right to avoid a hiring mistake. When done well, an interview allows you to thoroughly analyse the potential contribution of a candidate to your business. However, many interviews do not dig deep enough to find out if a candidate really will perform. Here are the most common and damaging interviewing mistakes:

Top 8 Interview Mistakes made by Hiring Managers

1.    Giving candidates the answer to your question

One of the most common mistakes in interviewing involves giving candidates the answer to your questions. While that sounds difficult to do, it’s as easy as asking a poorly constructed interview question. A ‘leading’ question tells a candidate exactly what you want to hear. In other words, the hiring manager is subconsciously giving hints to a candidate on how to ‘correctly’ answer their question. The candidate will tell you exactly want you want to hear – which is not the truth.

2.    Focusing only on how the candidate can benefit you

Traditionally, employers held the bargaining chip when it came to hiring. Nowadays, it’s more common to find that candidates are the ones with the power, as great staff become increasingly hard to find. The best candidates are now able to pick and choose amongst employers, and will be looking for an opportunity that excites them. Focusing only on how the candidate can benefit you will result in the best candidates instead moving on to the next opportunity.

3.    Asking superficial interview questions

Superficial interview questions will only show you how good a candidate is at interviewing – not whether they will be able to perform in the position. It’s easy to slip into asking superficial questions when we’re unprepared or when the interviewer hasn’t received formal interview training. When asking a superficial interview question, you’ll receive a superficial answer – something that has been well-practiced or memorised from the internet.

4.    Hiring based on personality, not performance

It’s an easy trap to fall into without a structured, objective interviewing process. However, hiring a candidate based only on a great personality match often becomes a big hiring mistake. Pay attention to your gut feeling, but put it on hold. Once you’ve collected the facts, you can review them with your first impressions to make a much more accurate hiring decision.

5.    Believing it is up to the candidate to perform well in the interview

It’s often assumed that it’s up to the candidate to perform well and sell their skills to their potential employer if they have those skills. However, not every candidate has the ability to dazzle in an interview. Setting each candidate equally up for success ensures that you’ll hire the person with the skills to perform the job, not in the interview. Create a welcoming environment that puts each candidate at ease, to ensure you are receiving the most honest and accurate answers from the interviewee.

6.    Assuming applicants can perform the role because they say they can

While most candidates will answer accurately to their skills, it’s important to have an objective process in place to check that they can really perform the role. Ask candidates for examples of their work or to detail how they’ve performed certain tasks and overcome problems before. Identify the most important areas of the role for success, and thoroughly test each promising candidate in those areas. When you hire, you won’t be guessing that they will be able to perform the role – you’ll know that they can.

7.    Giving candidates feedback in the interview

While a candidate might dazzle you in the first five minutes of their interview, resist the temptation to give them positive feedback during the interview. It’s good practice to detail the next step of the process, but it’s a mistake to let them know that they’ll be going through to the next round during the interview. This is particularly true if there are other candidates waiting to be interviewed – the next interviewee could be even better!

8.    Not comparing apples to apples

Use the same recruitment process for each candidate to ensure you make the most accurate hiring decision. If the interview process differs from candidate to candidate, the information that you’ve gathered will favour one candidate or another. Even if interviewing internal applicants or a referral, the interview process must remain the same for each and every position.

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