Recruiting Strategy

Interviewing 101

Interviewing 101
Siobhan Hasner

Siobhan Hasner

HireHive

This month we released an update to our interviewing tool in HireHive. It got us thinking about all the interviews we’ve had ourselves at various companies and also the interviews that have taken place at HireHive.

New Interview Scheduling Tool in HireHive

We updated our interview schedule tool to include an integration with Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar. This allows companies to more easily schedule interviews with colleagues and organise times that suit. Organising calendars can be a huge time suck in an organisation so having everyone's agenda in one place makes things so much easier and quicker.

This was a widely requested update and something we were really excited to release! We’re all about efficient interviewing so that you can focus on growing your team.

interview set up hirehive

We wanted to make sure that the set up for this was as easy as possible. When setting up an interview for the first time all you have to do is click ‘Connect Calendar’, choose your calendar and you’re all set up. You can then get your colleagues to do the same. The available times will then sync into HireHive automatically. We use a free/busy calendar so that information on what you are actually doing is never displayed. The agenda will just show you as ‘Busy’ if you have another appointment set up in your calendar.

Good Interviews

So what makes a good interview? It was something that we decided to really look at from the candidate perspective because a good interview experience all comes down to how the candidate feels regardless of whether they are successful or not.

Some of the best interviews we’d had ourselves all had common factors:

  • Really good communication from the company. This is so important throughout the whole recruitment process but especially at the interview stage.
  • Clear instructions. Interviews can be nerve wrecking and being able to prepare is important for most people so tips about who you’ll be interviewing with or what to focus on can be really helpful.
  • Follow up. We understand this may not always be possible but we were amazed how many people said they had a bad image of a company just because they got to a certain stage of the interview process and then never heard from them again.

Interview Experience

With all of this in mind we looked at some of our own interview experiences throughout the years - the good, the bad and the funny! Here are just some of them. Anonymous to protect the interviewers and interviewees!

One person went for an accounting internship position and was asked to write a full business plan for the business they were interviewing for. Anything under 50 pages would not be considered.

Someone else said the interviewer actually said to them that working there can be a ‘bit of a drag’ at times and asked them how they’d cope with that. She then said that if the person accepted the job she probably wouldn’t still be there for onboarding as she wanted to get out.

Finally one person said that they were sent to the wrong interview room by the receptionist and sat through 30 minutes of an interview for a data analyst position when they were there for a digital marketing role.

The good thing is we can laugh at these experiences now and hearing about these terrible interview experiences has definitely helped us shape a better interview strategy at HireHive and we definitely always make sure that we show the candidate to the right interview room!

Why not give interviewing with HireHive a try and see how it can save you time?

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