One of the most important things that any business can do is find and recruit top talent to their organization. Recruiting employees can be a challenging task, even during a recession it can be difficult to find the right employee for the job. This is where you can make a targeted effort to decide who to recruit, what message to convey about your company, and how your recruitment efforts should be spent.

If done incorrectly, your recruitment efforts could potentially produce job applicants who aren’t qualified to be in the position you’re filling, lack diversity in your business, or who may decline the offer. Poor vetting of candidates can be dangerous and costly for a business as the average cost-per-hire for companies is $4,129 per employee according to a SHRM survey!

This week we wanted to discuss some methodologies and strategies for conducting behavior-based interviews, culture interviews, and group interviews. These more specialized interviews can successfully analyze potential employees’ characteristics more than a general interview, therefore weeding out any bad candidates that wouldn’t be a good fit for your organization.

Specialized Interviews

Utilizing specialized interview strategies in your recruiting toolbox will allow you to discern the wheat from the chaff. Each of the three specialized strategies that we outline below is some excellent interview types to learn more about a potential candidate and how they would work in the role that you need filled. Keep in mind for these 3 strategies you should have a clear objective for the job posting to get the most out of each of these:

Group Interviews– The biggest advantage of group interviews is that it allows you to drastically reduce your time to hire. Group interviews allow you to evaluate multiple candidates at once, allowing you to move onto more specific interviews. This type of interview is excellent for a high application volume position but can also be useful to fill for more specialized positions.

Behavior-Based Interviews– Traditional interview questions can only go so far, so the behavior-based interview allows you to learn more about a candidate’s personality. Behavioral interviews allow you to ask the candidate how they responded to a real-life work situation to better understand how they would react if they were hired. This gives allows you to see if the candidate would be a good fit based on their past actions in similar jobs or experiences.

Culture Interviews– This interview type allows you to think of your company culture and build a profile for the model employee that you would like to apply there. You can then take this model and interview candidates to see how they will perform in their role. Some examples of what you can evaluate out of a culture interview are if the candidate can work in a team, if they are motivated similarly to your other employees, and if they have the same mindset to handle the stress of the job.

Interview Methodologies

Now that we have a clear picture of these specialized interview strategies let’s think of some ways that we can begin to implement them in your recruiting efforts. We asked our HR experts on some strategies to get you started and this is what they had to say:

Cultural Interview– Designing these questions can be a little more difficult than other interview types. You can’t directly ask candidates questions like “Are you funny?” and expect to get a direct answer, but what you can do to gauge if a candidate is a good cultural fit for your company is ask them about experiences they’ve had. When you get to the cultural part of the interview be sure to tell them that there are no right or wrong answers to these questions and you just want to get to know them a bit better

Group Interview– These interview types should include a manager, a member of your HR team, and someone who has worked in the position that needs to be filled. This allows you to figure out which candidates stand out in a pool of potential employees. Planning with the interviewers is key to figure out who is going to ask what questions and when. Coming up with a game plan before the interviewers meet the candidates is key to making the process as smooth as possible.

Behavioral Interview– Begin by speaking with people who were successful in the role that you are trying to fill. This can give you an idea of what skills and traits it takes to flourish in the position. Collaborate with team leaders to try and figure out what they’re looking for and then begin to build a list of traits that you would want to see in a candidate. Now that you have a list of traits that you want, when you get your candidate’s answers to your questions you can carefully evaluate how they measure up.

Having issues finding the right employees for the job? SolveHR offers the best recruitment and selection strategies that are designed to attract qualified and talented employees. We help assess your organizational needs and create a tailored strategy to help you fill the position and retain the employee. Contact us to find out how our services can help take the headache out of employee recruitment, so you can focus on what’s important—growing your business!

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Written by: Matthew Muriel

Meet Matthew! Matthew is our content writer and has been working with us for a year. He enjoys working for SolveHR because it allows him to practice his copywriting and allows him to build experience in his fledgling career. Matthew studied at the University of Texas at San Antonio and earned his degree in English with a concentration in Professional Writing. He values learning new processes in the HR industry and then conveying those ideas to the company’s clients. When he isn’t working, he enjoys reading nonfiction, with his favorite book that he recently read being The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee. If he could go anywhere in the world he would travel across the United States and visit all of the national parks.