Interviewing

Finding the Best Candidate for Your Vacancy

The interviewing process is a powerful tool in helping you find the candidate that will best fill the vacancy in your department. To hone your interviewing skills, we highly recommend attending UBC’s Selection Behavioural Interviewing Skills Workshop. The following tips are based on the full day workshops’ objectives.

Interview Process

Develop your selection criteria, and assign a weight to each question based on the job description to ensure that the process is objective.

• create a selection committee of two to three people
• shortlist the candidates you are interested in interviewing
• develop your questions, which should be behavioural-based questions, so that you can gather the best information
• call your HR Associate if you need help developing your questions, or see Common Behavioural Interview Questions (PDF) for examples

It can be hard to listen actively and take complete notes at the same time. Ensure that one member of your panel is assigned to taking notes during the interview so that you can refer to them when making your final decision.

Prepare the candidate – interviews are stressful enough for candidates, without being faced with surprises. Let the candidate know if you plan to have a panel interview so they are not caught off-guard, and inform them ahead of time if there is any testing that will take place. Interviews should usually last approximately one hour, and testing should not exceed 45 minutes.

At the end of each interview, weigh the candidate against your established criteria, and include any testing and references in the candidate’s final score.

Once you are finished interviewing, testing and reference checking all the candidates, compare the scores of each member of the selection committee to make a final decision.

If there is no suitable candidate, we recommend starting the process again by reposting, rather than trying to force a fit.