Interviews are an essential part of the recruitment processes for all businesses, serving as a medium for information exchange between hiring managers and potential candidates. As a result, in order to identify the top candidates, HR professionals and talent acquisition supervisors must be well-versed in interview skills. Why does this matter? What are some types of interviews commonly used in recruitment?

Why Interview Matters

Interview session is an essential step in the employee selection and succession planning processes that resulting in the following benefits: 

• Serving as an employer’s initial opportunity to meet with job candidates. 
• Providing time for hiring managers and others to interact with candidates to gain insights into their experience, skills, knowledge, behaviors, etc. 
• Enabling an employer to determine if a candidate’s skills, experience, and personality meet the jobs’ requirements. 
• Helping an employer to assess whether an applicant would likely fit in with the corporate and/or team culture. 

Here are some types of interview and their functions

Behavioral interview 

The concept of this interview is that previous performance is the most reliable predictor of upcoming success. The questions should uncover evidence of how a candidate has previously done. 

Example: Tell me about a specific time when you encountered a problem and at the same time, your boss becomes so pushy about a certain project. Have you ever been in a similar situation, how did you feel about the situation and what did you do? 

Open-ended interview 

 This interview type asks a candidate to respond in detail and allows the interview to flow like a conversation, allowing the applicant to do most of the talking.

Example: How would you describe your strengths and weaknesses in the workplace? Or what special aspects of your education, training, or work experience have prepared you for this job? 

Competency-based interview 

This interview supports hiring managers in analyzing candidates’ understanding about the role. The purpose of this interview is to determine whether prospective applicants are capable of handling the job desk that will be allocated to them in the future.

Example: How will you re-calculate payroll if there is a certain sudden change in the payroll system or laws? (For hiring payroll specialists) 

Read Also: Remote Hiring is the Key to Recruiting Top Talents 

Case interview 

The case interview is used to evaluate candidates for partner-track and associate-level positions. It involves the participation of giving candidates with a practical business scenario identical to one that your company encounters on a daily basis.

Example: Hiring managers should give context and examples of problems the company often handles and ask how the prospective candidate would solve it. 

Panel or group interview 

A panel interview, as the term indicates, is equivalent to most face-to-face interviews, except there will be two or more interviewers involved. Panel interviews are frequently used to eliminate hiring prejudice and save both the business and the candidates time. In a group interview, one interviewer should start the process by asking all of the main topics, while the other interviewers follow up with further in-depth questions about each subject. This streamlines the interview process and helps to avoid overlaps or interruptions.

STAR interview  

STAR is an acronym that stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Results. STAR interviews, among other types of interviews, offer hiring managers with an ideal opportunity to evaluate a candidate’s communications skills. This type of interview also contributes in the discovery of basic yet strong information regarding a candidate’s approach to certain work conditions and obstacles.

Question examples for each point would be: 

• Situation – Hiring managers should ask candidates to present a recent challenging situation in which they found themselves. 
• Task – To know how candidates handle and achieve their goals in the given situation. The question can be: “What do you need to achieve the expected result?” 
• Action – To know what steps or process candidates encounter to achieve the results. The question can be: “What kind of step or plan did you do to achieve those results?” 
• Result – “What were the outcomes of your actions?” “What did you achieve and did you meet your objectives?” “What did you learn from the experience and how did you use the learning since then?” 

Structured interview 

Because structured interviews are very short, they are appropriate for interviewing a large number of people. In this interview style, questions are frequently detailed and provide the interviewee a defined range of answers, such as closed, closed-ended, pre-coded, or fixed choice questions.

Example: Did you enjoy your previous job? Would you say that you have the analytical ability that this job requires? Are you a union-organizing type or are you anti-union? Or, can you tell me about your position with your previous employer? 

Every candidate will be ready to answer common interview questions. Find new ways to genuinely grasp how someone works. Place the candidates in circumstances that will allow them to reveal their true self. However, keep in mind that you will not be the only one who will have to work with these candidates once they are hired. There is almost certainly already a team of employees you trust who will have to engage with him or her on a daily basis, so their input should be valued. Good luck!

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