Hiring Wisdom: How to Truly Be an Effective Interviewer

If you want to get better at golf, you need to practice.

You can’t just go to the course, play one round, wait six months to play again and hope to be any better. To improve your game, you need to practice, play, and perhaps even get a coach.

The same is true when it comes to interviewing job applicants.

How to be an effective interviewer

You can’t just do it today and then wait until you have another job to fill and expect that you’ll improve. In order to be an effective interviewer and make sound hiring decisions, you need to:

Practice (do it regularly).
Use hiring tools (testing, structured interviews, reference checks, etc.) to gather more and better information.
Get some training and/or coaching.
With the applicant’s permission, video an interview and ask peers for critiques.
Keep score. (Are you over or under par when it comes to hiring winners? The pros get it right about 83 percent of the time.)

This was originally published on Mel Kleiman’s Humetrics blog.