The ultimate guide to creating and optimising your interview process

Chances are, you could’ve avoided this if your interview process had been better optimised. With a strong interview process in place, you’ll hire top talent more quickly, efficiently, and accurately.

It also increases your chances of delivering a polished and professional recruiting experience to potential candidates. And large-scale research by PwC has shown that almost half (49%) of job seekers in in-demand fields (like technology) say they’ve turned down a job offer due to a negative recruiting experience.

Moreover, Jobvite’s 2021 Recruiter Nation Report found that recruiters highlighted improving quality of hire (48%) and time to hire (28%) as their two biggest priorities in recruiting. To do so, you need a foolproof interview process.

This complete guide helps you do just that. Don’t worry, we’ve made it easily digestible and we’ll guide you through each step with examples and handy infographics. Read this guide, and you will have your new and improved interview process up and running in no time. Let’s go!

The interview process includes much more than just the interviews themselves. Before you invite a candidate, you want to define the structure and different stages of your process and outline what is needed at every step. This ensures efficiency and consistency, leading to a faster, better-streamlined process.

Now there are many ways in which you can interview a candidate. And your interview process can (and most likely will) include a combination of multiple different interview types.

Interviews often contain a mix of two or more of these elements, while the process as a whole will contain several interviews.

Throughout this guide, we’ll explain which type of interview is the best suitable for each stage of the process, and how you can best use each type to your advantage. Since every organisation, industry, and position you’re hiring for is different, what steps need to be included in the interview process can vary.

However, there is a common structure that companies tend to follow. This includes the following five interview stages.

The first stage is generally an initial screening interview that follows after you selected one or more potential candidates from the applications you received. This interview aims to assess if the candidate has the basic skills to perform the role and if they have the right expectations of your business.

The screening interview stage is normally done one-on-one, by phone or by video call, and is kept relatively short (around 15 minutes). It helps the hiring manager or recruiter quickly narrow down the number of applicants, which is called shortlisting.

Screening interview questions tend to focus on assessing a candidate’s hard skills and practical work experience.

After a round of screening interviews, you will end up with a shorter list of candidates that seem suitable for the position. Now it’s time to really get to know them and test whether they would work well within your organisation.

This stage is often still done one-on-one, although it will often involve a different stakeholder. For example, screening is typically done by a recruiter or HR employee, while the first interview tends to involve the team lead who will be directly managing the new hire.

Interview questions will be more tailored to finding out how the candidate might actually perform the tasks specific to the role and your organisation. You will also try to dive deeper into their work experience (beyond just bullet points on their CV).

Furthermore, you will simultaneously focus more on getting to know their personality and how they might work within your team.

You’re really starting to narrow it down now! At this stage, you should only have a few candidates left who are all serious contenders for the position.

The second interview is generally done with more than one interviewer (panel interview) and often involves the candidate meeting their direct team. For in-person interviews, a tour through the office might be included and, in some cases, even a team lunch (either on or off-site).

Interview questions are typically more behavioural and situational (see the interview question type examples for more information) to further get to know the person and their way of working.

Many companies skip this step and combine it with the previous one. Whether you want to have two or three interviews in your process will depend on factors such as the seniority, complexity of the role, and urgency of the hire.

The content of this interview may vary, but often some form of skill assessment or business case is presented to the candidate, which they either finish before or during the interview (case interview). For example, they might be given a business case that they then present during their interview. This interview can be done both virtually or in person.

Interview questions may be related to the task, or be more situational in nature. Meaning, these questions are asked with the candidate being hired in mind.

The final stage is where you reach a final decision: To hire or not to hire. The interview process will officially be finished as soon as you send out a job offer.

Any contract negotiations and additional communication between you and the candidate will fall within the broader hiring process, but not within the interview process. As soon as the contract is signed, the onboarding process starts.

Deciding on the stages of the interview process is one thing. Now it’s time to further fine-tune and shape the process. How will you collaborate with your team members? And how will you structure the interviews themselves? Find out below with these 6 top tips!

An interview scorecard ensures you can easily grade every candidate based on the exact same criteria. This way, everyone is judged fairly and equally. It also means it is easier for you to make an informed hiring decision.

When used effectively and consistently, an interview scorecard can limit the potential for bias in your scoring of candidates. More information on bias in hiring below.

If you read our guide on creating a job ad, you will have already done a lot of the groundwork for this step.

When creating a scorecard, carefully consider your job description for the role you are hiring for. What hard skills and soft skills does the candidate need? What certificates/qualifications are needed to be able to legally perform the job?

A process within a process: An important part of the interview process is having a structured process for the actual interview(s) as well.

Ideally, you create a separate interview structure for each of the first four stages of the interview process we mentioned earlier (screening, first, second, and third interviews).

Outlining the interview beforehand helps make your interviews more structured and organised. And that improves the candidate experience as well. Because if you’re unorganised and unprepared during the interview, your candidate will take you less seriously as an employer.

Here is an example checklist to use when you prepare for your interviews:

We explain more about the actual interview further on in this guide in Part 3: Interviewing a candidate.

Let the team know who will be involved in the process and share all the relevant documents discussed in the previous points.

Also, ensure you provide regular updates on progress. These updates can include the number of applicants, the number of rejections, and who will be invited for an initial interview. Many companies create a spreadsheet where they keep track of all these points.

This doesn’t have to all be done manually, of course. If you use JOIN’s applicant tracking software, you can easily organise all applications and move them through your hiring funnel using the intuitive kanban board inside the tool.

Now you have the basics in place, it’s time to organise the interview. The steps to follow here will depend on what stage of the interview process your candidate is in.

Following the initial interview structure you created, now go more in-depth and plan and prepare for the actual interview and the specific candidate. This part is for both you and your colleagues participating in the interview.

We are all biased, but we can do our best to limit it. Of course, avoiding bias and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace and the recruitment process are extensive topics. So we can’t possibly cover everything in this guide!

Defining an optimised interview process for your company helps you move candidates through your hiring funnel more quickly and efficiently. But you still need to conduct the actual interview as well. What questions will you ask, and how will you structure the actual interview itself? Below, we’ll guide you through the steps of creating this process within a process.

Conducting an interview is like writing a paper for school. You start with an introduction, followed by the main part, and you finish with a conclusion. Let’s see how you can streamline each part, step by step.

The opening is all about settling in and setting expectations. If you do this part right, you have a much higher chance of a fruitful interview. Here are the key points that should be included in the opening part of the interview:

Now both parties have settled in and got to know each other, it’s time to start the actual interview part.

You should have prepared a list of questions (see infographic above) that assess the right skills and experience. By preparing this beforehand, your interview will be well-structured. And by asking each candidate the same questions, it will be easier to compare candidates for moving forward.

Don’t forget to take notes during the interview. Focus on the candidate’s answers, but also on personal characteristics such as body language. Let the candidate know beforehand you’ll take notes and that this shouldn’t be misunderstood as a bad sign.

Ask your candidate if they have questions for you as well. This not only tests if they have prepared enough and done their research into your company, but it also gives them the option to find out if they like your company.

Try to keep an eye on the clock during the interview, so you don’t spend too much time on one aspect of the interview. Candidates can be way too detailed in their answers, but it’s also possible that you are talking too much yourself.

Stay focussed on the answers you are after. Although it’s OK to sometimes go slightly off-topic, you should aim to steer the conversation in the right direction.

You’re almost there! Now it’s time to evaluate your candidate(s) and come to a decision. We also advise you to always review your own performance to see if there are ways you might improve and further fine-tune your interview process.

Remember that speed is crucial in the interview process. The less time to hire, the better, or you risk the chance of your candidate dropping out of the process before you can make an offer.

Depending on the number of candidates you’re interviewing, you should aim to share your decision within 72 hours at the latest. If you wait a week, the candidate might have already received an offer from your competitor.

So how do you come to a decision?

Time to let your candidate know about your decision. Even if you decide to not proceed, we still advise you to always let the candidate know and provide feedback on why you made this decision.

Research has shown that rejected applicants who don’t receive feedback are twice as likely to not apply to or do business with your company again.

Once you have sent the candidate a job offer, the interview process is officially completed. Here are some final pointers to keep in mind: