The ultimate goal of interviews is to identify and hire individuals who can add value to your company. However, that’s not the only goal of the process. In fact, high-value interviews can help you hire impactful candidates and boost your candidate experience as well.
Recently, high-value interviews have become even more popular as companies prioritize thorough skill evaluation, resulting in more efficient hiring. If this is also your goal, then you’re definitely in the right place! This guide explains what high-value assessments are and how you can conduct them while assessing candidates.
What is a high-value interview?
A high-value interview is a corporate inquiry designed to obtain in-depth information about the candidate and how valuable they can be to the company. Put simply, these interviews help the company better understand the candidates and their skills, allowing them to make effective hiring decisions while boosting candidate experience in the process.
High-value interviews go beyond basic fact-finding to identify good candidates for a role. Instead, they focus on detailed experiences and unique candidate perspectives that allow the company to gauge how much positive impact they can make. To achieve this, the interviewer creates a space where the candidates can express themselves better and highlight their experiences properly.
The questions in a high-value interview focus on predicting how well the candidate would perform in the role and contribute to the company if hired. To achieve this, value interview questions create a platform where the candidate can demonstrate their skills and significant achievements, which show that they will be a vital asset to the company.
Often, recruiters mistake high-value interviews for other techniques like value-based interviews. The latter focuses on the candidates’ values, beliefs, and behaviors and tests how well they align with the company. However, a high-value interview focuses on demonstrating the candidates’ potential impact and contribution to the company’s success.
By combining a comprehensive interview structure, insightful inquiries, and a focus on candidate experience, both the employer and the candidate can gain value from the process. On the one hand, the employer gets enough information to determine whether the candidate has an excellent job fit. On the other hand, the candidate can express themselves properly, obtain information about the company, and even gain crucial details about the job.
How to prep for a high-value interview
For a high-value interview to be effective, preparation is key. Unlike normal interviews, prepping for a high-value interview requires you to develop a strategy to gather relevant insights from the process by setting the right platform for the candidates to express themselves.
Below, we’ve put together some ways to prepare for a high-value interview adequately:
1. Develop a structure for your interviews
Creating a structure for your interviews is one of the most important preparatory steps to ensure their quality. Essentially, it involves predetermining how each step in the interview process will go and planning the questions you ask at each stage.
Here’s a great example of the ideal structure for a high-value interview:
- Stage 1: Start by explaining the structure of the interview and encouraging the candidates to introduce themselves.
- Stage 2: Based on their introduction, ask the candidate to elaborate on some of their experiences.
- Stage 3: Ask about the candidate’s skills and past scenarios where they applied these skills. You can use their resumes for reference.
- Stage 4: Use behavioral questions to assess culture fit and culture add.
- Stage 5: Conclude by allowing the candidates room to ask their questions and then give them an overview of the post-interview process.
Doing this helps you to project how long the interview will take, enabling you to determine important parts of the process, like how many candidates you’d interview per day.
2. Determine your objectives
For a high-value interview to achieve its goals, you must first clarify what those goals are. Whether you’re trying to fill a skill gap within your company or hire candidates for culture add, determining your objectives will give you direction on what questions to ask and how to steer the conversation.
3. Research the interviewee
High-value interviews are focused on understanding the candidate, their experience, and their skills. However, a significant part of this process starts before the actual interviews. By performing research on the interviewee, you can gain insights into their experiences, background, and achievements. This can help you draft questions that allow them to explain these experiences properly, letting you understand them better.
Proper candidate research includes applying resume screening, performing background checks, analyzing their online presence, and evaluating their references.
4. Craft your questions
Preparing for your high-value interview isn’t complete without crafting perfect and comprehensive questions that adequately assess the candidate’s knowledge and skill. Ideally, your questions should invite the candidate to elaborate on their experiences, encouraging them to paint pictures of past projects or challenges they faced in their former roles.
To do this, you can apply situational interview questions or behavioral inquiries. You can also use sequenced questions that start with broader topics, like their overall skills, to more specific ones, like the skills they gained at a particular job. Additionally, you must avoid yes/no questions, as they hinder insightful answers, thus reducing the quality of the interview.
5. Choose an appropriate setting
You can either conduct your high-value interviews online or physically. If you plan to utilize virtual interviewing, it’s always a good idea to select a great online meeting platform, such as Google Meet or Zoom, and set it up beforehand. This way, you can schedule the meeting ahead of time to prevent delays or even record the meeting for reference. You should also encourage the candidate to turn on their camera so you can interact in real time and observe their expressions.
On the flip side, if you plan to use physical interviews, you must set up the office space for the meeting beforehand. While doing this, ensure that the space is silent and free of distractions, such as background noise from passing cars, bright screens, or cluttered surroundings.
How to conduct a high-value interview
To harness the benefits of high-value interviews, you need to conduct the process properly, directed by a great strategy. Fortunately, that’s what this section is all about. So, tag along as we explore the steps to conducting a high-value interview successfully.
Step 1: Create a comfortable atmosphere
A comfortable interview atmosphere helps the candidate feel at ease and able to express themselves openly. As such, they can properly describe their experiences without the tension, reducing the chances of stuttering and ensuring you understand them better.
To set a comfortable atmosphere for your high-value interview, you should:
- Begin the interview on a warm note by greeting the candidate and introducing yourself calmly and professionally.
- Explain the interview process, including the stages they’d undergo.
- Maintain relaxed body language, ensuring your hands are visible and not folded, as it could give off a defensive demeanor.
- Demonstrate involvement in the interview by maintaining eye contact and nodding as the candidate speaks.
Ultimately, this encourages the candidate to keep speaking because they feel respected, valued, and at ease, leading to a more insightful conversation.
Step 2: Practice active listening
Active listening fundamentally means fully engaging with the candidate’s responses to get enough information from the interview. To do this, you need to view the interview as a conversational one and encourage effective communication with the candidate.
Here’s how:
- Avoid interrupting the candidate in the middle of their speech.
- Focus on the candidate’s speech rather than thinking of the next question. This will prevent you from getting distracted and missing relevant insights from the interview.
- Avoid glancing at devices too often, as it can make the interviewee feel like you’re not fully focused.
Step 3: Dig deeper with probing questions
High-value interviews thrive on depth, so don’t hold back on asking probing questions that push beyond the candidate’s initial response. This ensures the candidate goes into detail about their experiences and skills. It also gives you insights into their communication and reasoning skills, carriage, and expression.
Here are some tips when using probing questions in your high-value interview:
- Do: Follow up on interesting points with questions like, “What led to that decision?” or “How did you tackle that problem?”
- Don’t: Overdo it by asking questions too quickly in a way that comes off as defensive.
- Do: Encourage the candidate to use real-life scenarios and stories based on experience.
- Don’t: Interrupt the candidate with a question while they’re responding to another.
Step 4: Take notes throughout the interview
When conducting your high-value interview, taking notes provides you with a detailed overview of how the process went, especially if it’s not a recorded interview. By taking notes, you can keep track of the insights from the candidates’ responses and refer to them to ask further questions or verify information after the interviews.
When taking notes, you should ensure that there’s a balance between the amount of eye contact you have with the candidate and the time you spend writing. It’s always best to note qualities like their listening skills, speaking skills, and attention to detail.
Best practices for conducting a high-value interview
During a high-value interview, there are some techniques you can incorporate to make the process seamless and more effective. We’ll discuss some of these best practices in this section:
1. Utilize tools to maximize the value of your interviews
According to a JobScan report, 98% of Fortune companies use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to monitor candidates pre or post-interview or application. In high-value interviews, an ATS can serve as a database showing crucial information about candidates, which you can retrieve at any time.
Integrating tools like an ATS helps save time and automate processes like data entry, making interviews more streamlined and easy to conduct.
2. Ensure the interviews are compliant
While interviewing candidates, ensure that your practices align with recruitment regulations like the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) laws. This allows you to give all your candidates a chance to demonstrate their skills and innovative ideas to you without limitations due to background, race, or ethnicity.
3. Apply pre-employment tests before the interview
Before your interviews, a pre-employment test can help you filter through numerous applicants to locate those with a high potential to succeed in the role. This way, you spend less time screening candidates that don’t have the right job fit and instead focus on providing high-quality interviews for those with the skills your company needs.
To set up your skills testing procedure, it’s crucial to integrate a reliable testing platform like Vervoe to screen and rank candidates adequately based on their performance. This makes the process seamless and allows you to screen as many candidates as you want simultaneously and thoroughly.
Beyond its comprehensive screening tests and questions, Vervoe has advanced skill assessment features that make your hiring much easier and seamless. For example, the platform uses AI to grade candidates based on your company’s standards. In addition, Vervoe’s realistic job previews allow you to predict candidate performance based on their ability to solve common problems in the role.
After the high-value interviews, what next?
The answer to this question is simple: follow up. A high-value interview doesn’t end once the candidate completes the process; what you do after also matters. Following up on candidates after a job interview can help you gain useful insights into their experience with the process and even the interviewer. In turn, this gives you enough information to conduct future interviews and ensure they’re of an even higher quality than the last.
Furthermore, follow-ups show candidates that your company respects their time, even though they didn’t pass the screening. For those who did pass, it ensures that you’re among the top options and prevents you from losing newly identified talent before you make an offer.
Here are some tips for crafting your interview follow-up email:
- Thank them for their time and for applying for the post.
- If you’re still screening the insights from the interview, let the candidate know.
- Ensure that the message is short, between 2 and 4 paragraphs.
- Ask them for feedback on the interview and the entire screening process.
The perfect partner for your high-value interview
With high-value interviews, the little things matter. From the preparation for the interviews to the follow-up, each step adds more value to your interview, making it more efficient and comprehensive. But it doesn’t stop there. You can add even more value to your interviews with excellent pre-employment testing.
Vervoe is an AI-powered skills testing platform with over 300 specialized tests in its assessment library for various roles. It is also equipped with high-end features like job simulations and a comprehensive resource library with information on how to carry out a seamless recruitment process.
The best part is that you can use Vervoe at any point in your hiring funnel, including before your interviews, to help you hire the best of the best. So waste no time! Get your free demo today and let Vervoe set you up for high-quality recruitment.
