Over the years, I’ve conducted thousands of interviews. Later, I led and developed recruiters who were interviewing candidates every day and worked with them on candidate assessments.
After so many interviews, you might think I’d have settled on a reliable way to assess candidates by now. I haven’t. I have, however, learned where to pay closer attention.
First impressions shouldn’t decide the outcome of an interview
I believe experience helps you develop a good instinct for people. But I also know how misleading first impressions can be.
I’ve interviewed candidates who seemed unsure of themselves at the start of the conversation and later turned out to be excellent. And others who made a very strong impression in the first few minutes, only for that impression not to hold up as the conversation went on.
Sometimes people simply don’t manage to express themselves as well as they would like straight away. Sometimes they need a few minutes to relax, and sometimes it takes an additional question for them to explain their experience or thinking in a way that completely changes that initial impression.
That’s why I treat a first impression as information, not a conclusion. If a candidate isn’t given the opportunity to show what they know and what they can do because the interview is too formal or rushed, then part of the responsibility for an incomplete assessment lies with us.
Questions are preparation, not a script
Before an interview, I want to understand the role, the expectations of the person hiring and what I actually need to assess in a candidate. If I’m less familiar with a particular area, I’ll research it before the conversation. Without that preparation, even the best list of questions won’t help much.
I prepare questions so I don’t miss anything important, but I rarely ask them in order. A candidate will often touch on something early in the conversation that I had planned to ask about later, or say something that opens up a line of questioning I hadn’t planned at all. If I simply move on to the next question on my list, I may miss the very thing that has just become interesting.
Follow-up questions are particularly important to me. I don’t use them to confirm my first impression, but to check whether I’ve understood what the candidate has told me.
If someone says they have a lot of experience, I want to know where they gained it, what they actually did and what they learned from it. A brief or general answer tells me something too, but I want to give it context before drawing a conclusion.
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Send enquiryWhen something raises a red flag, I ask one more question
Arriving late for an interview, frequent job changes, very specific questions, or a candidate who praises the company excessively and seems to say almost everything we would want to hear – all of these will get my attention.
Earlier in my career, I might have been quicker to decide what something like that meant. Today, I’m more likely to ask one more question first.
The reason behind frequent job changes may confirm what concerned me, but it may also reveal circumstances I could never have known from a CV. The same applies to being late, an unusual question or an answer that sounds a little too well prepared.
Sometimes an additional question confirms my concern, sometimes it removes it completely, and sometimes I still don’t have a clear answer by the end of the interview. In that case, I can explain to the person making the hiring decision what I noticed and why I see it as a potential risk. I don’t need to turn every assessment into a level of certainty I don’t actually have.
Experience doesn’t always have to be decisive
For some roles, experience is a prerequisite and there isn’t much room for compromise. For others, insisting on the ideal profile can mean spending months looking for someone who meets every criterion while overlooking people who could be very successful in the role.
When a candidate is missing some of the experience we are looking for, I want to understand what else they can bring.
How do they approach a problem they haven’t encountered before? Do they take responsibility for their own decisions? How do they talk about mistakes? What have they learned on their own, and why? These things often get very little space on a CV, but in an interview they can completely change how I assess a candidate.
I took this into account particularly when recruiting for hard-to-fill roles. If there is room for development in the role, I would rather make the case for why a candidate with slightly less experience has the potential to succeed than reject them simply because they don’t match every part of the original profile.
An interview isn’t a one-sided assessment
An interview is an opportunity for us to assess the candidate, but also for the candidate to decide whether the role and the organisation are right for them. I’ve therefore never seen it as a one-sided interrogation.
I want enough information to make a good assessment, but I also want the person on the other side of the conversation to know enough to decide whether they want the job. That includes the parts that may not be the most attractive.
Making a role sound better than it is may help a candidate accept an offer, but if they only discover after starting that the job isn’t what they expected, we’ve simply postponed the problem.
Both sides should know what to expect before making a decision.
Notes shouldn’t take over the conversation
Early in my career, I used to take far more notes than I do today. Over time, I realised that in trying to capture every detail, I could easily miss something more important in the conversation itself.
Candidates notice when we look down and start writing after they answer. They don’t know whether we’re noting something positive, a neutral fact or the very thing we didn’t like.
If it keeps happening, they may become more cautious and start thinking about our reaction rather than their own answer. At that point, we’ve already influenced the conversation we’re trying to assess.
I still take notes, but I keep them brief. They should help me remember an important fact later, not take my attention away from the person I’m speaking to.
The more experience we have, the easier it is to believe we can assess a candidate very quickly. My experience has taught me the opposite: the real value isn’t in reaching conclusions faster, but in recognising how easily we can get it wrong when we reach them too soon.