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The Advantages Of Good Interview Planning

You need to find a new employee. Before launching full speed ahead in recruitment, take the time for interview planning. A good hiring plan will help your growing business streamline the process to finding and hiring the employee that best suits your business.

What’s in a plan?

A good interview plan maps out each stage of the hiring process. First, identify the major milestones for before, during and after your interviews. You can then create a hiring workflow to help you streamline the process to fit the job and keep your recruitment process on track.

Here are some things to consider when interview planning:

  • What does the job involve?
  • What are the selection criteria?
  • How will you advertise the job?
  • How will you receive applications?
  • How will you identify who to interview?
  • When and where will you hold the interviews?
  • Who will conduct the interviews?
  • How will you evaluate the interviews and how long will it take?
  • What happens after the interview? (For example, will you check references or conduct security checks?)
  • How will you make the job offer?

The benefits of interview planning

The more you plan ahead, the smoother and more effective your recruitment process will be. Five key advantages to interview planning are: efficiency, clarity, relevance, consistency and a good candidate experience.

An efficient hiring process

To save on hiring costs, you need a process that is efficient. This means both a streamlined hiring process and a process that leads to the right employee for the job. By clearly identifying the key job criteria in advance, interview planning helps to eliminate unnecessary steps and ensure that each stage of the process matches your business needs.

Clear objectives, roles and responsibilities

Several people are often involved in the hiring process. Interview planning and a workflow are essential to keeping everyone on the same page about the goals, stages and timing of your hiring process.

The right questions

An effective interview is one that identifies the best person for the job. By planning ahead, you know what criteria need to be met, allowing you to focus on questions that are relevant and that allow you to properly assess these criteria.

A consistent approach to each interview

When evaluating candidates, you can’t compare apples to oranges. Interview planning leads to a fair process in which each candidate is asked the same questions and given the same amount of time to answer them.

A good candidate experience

Finally, an interview process works two ways. Just as you are assessing candidates, they are assessing your company to determine whether it is a good place to work. With effective interview planning, you can provide a favorable impression by ensuring that you assess applications, schedule interviews and make your decisions in a timely manner. You don’t want to miss out on good candidates because you are disorganized and they’ve already chosen a different job by the time you are ready to make an offer. Candidate experience is critical.

Follow your workflow

Now that you know the advantages to interview planning, there is one last step. After taking the time to plan your interview process, you need to follow the plan. Create and follow a clear workflow and you can get the most from your interviews.

Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash