The hiring manager's interview handbook

Almost nobody who conducts interviews has been trained to conduct interviews. This is the training, written for people who will be interviewing on Thursday.

Why interviews go wrong

Interviews fail in predictable ways, and almost none of them are about a lack of intelligence or effort on the interviewer's part. They fail because interviewing is a specific skill that organisations assume people acquire automatically by being good at their job.

The four most common failures:

• The interview measures comfort, not capability. An unstructured conversation rewards candidates who are socially similar to you, which correlates with almost nothing about job performance.
• The interviewer talks too much. Explaining the role, filling silences, being welcoming — all well-intentioned, all reducing the evidence you gather.
• Vague answers go unchallenged. "I led that project" is not evidence. What did you personally decide?
• The decision is made in the first five minutes and the remaining forty are spent confirming it.

Before the interview

Know what you are assessing

If you cannot name the three or four things this conversation is meant to establish, the interview will drift. Take the requirements from the job description and pick the ones this stage is responsible for — not all of them, just yours. Assessing the same competency in four consecutive interviews wastes three of them.

Write your questions down

Improvised questions are systematically worse: they follow whatever the CV made you curious about, which differs for every candidate, which makes candidates incomparable. Writing them down takes ten minutes and is the single highest-return preparation you can do.

Decide what a good answer sounds like

Before you ask a question, know roughly what would satisfy you. Otherwise you evaluate answers against how confidently they were delivered — which is a measure of confidence, not competence.

Asking questions well

Ask about the past, not the hypothetical

"What would you do if a project was running late?" produces a description of best practice that anyone can give. "Tell me about the last time a project you were on ran late" produces a specific situation you can probe. See behavioural interviewing.

Never ask a question that contains its own answer

"You've done a lot of stakeholder management, haven't you?" gets you a yes. This is a leading question, and it is the most common way an interview gathers no information. Ask what happened, not whether something happened.

Follow up — this is where the interview actually happens

The first answer to any question is the prepared one. The information is in the second and third. When you hear something general, get specific:

• "What specifically did you decide there?"
• "Who disagreed, and what did they say?"
• "What would you do differently?"
• "What happened after that?"

Let silence do the work

After a candidate finishes, wait three seconds before speaking. A meaningful proportion of the time they will add the most useful thing they say. Interviewers who fill silence immediately never hear it.

Talk ratio

Aim to speak for no more than about 25% of an assessment interview. Most untrained interviewers are far above this and have no idea — it is invisible from the inside because your own talking feels necessary in the moment.

Where the time usually goes: explaining the role at length (put it in writing beforehand), rephrasing your own questions when the candidate pauses to think, and reacting to answers with your own related experience. See talk ratio.

Note-taking

Typing during an interview means you are not listening, and the notes you produce optimise for what was easy to capture rather than what mattered. Writing up from memory afterwards loses the specifics that would have made the decision clear.

The options, in order of preference: record and transcribe the interview so you can be fully present; or have a second person take notes while one person leads; or write down only direct quotes and specific facts, not your interpretation.

Whichever you choose, write your assessment within the hour. Memory of a 45-minute conversation degrades sharply and — worse — reshapes itself around your overall impression, so by the next day you will recall evidence that supports the view you already formed.

Scoring

Score independently, before you talk to anyone else. Anchoring is powerful enough that hearing a colleague's view genuinely alters your recollection of what happened — you will not notice it happening.

Record the evidence, not just the rating. A 4 with no supporting quote is unusable in a debrief. Use a scorecard so every interviewer records the same things.

Habits that quietly ruin interviews

Getting better

Interviewing is one of the few professional skills people practise for decades without feedback. You cannot see your own talk ratio, you do not notice your leading questions, and nobody tells you that you accepted three vague answers in a row.

The fix is to review your own interviews. Read a transcript of one you conducted and mark every question you asked — how many were open, how many were leading, and how often you followed up on a general answer. Most people find it uncomfortable and useful in roughly equal measure. HireIQ does this automatically, but a transcript and a highlighter works too.

Common questions