If you’re hiring, there’s a chance your office is understaffed and you’re paddling upstream against hundreds of emails. But no matter how bad it is, avoid multitasking during interviews and come prepared. You shouldn’t be reading their resume for the first time while they sit across from you smiling in their nicely pressed clothing.

Don’t Read Emails or Texts While Interviewing

You’d be surprised how accustomed people are to working through their screens instead of giving face-to-face meetings preference. To avoid this, block out your calendar for the interview but also for fifteen or even thirty minutes ahead of the interview.

Be Prepared

As an interviewer you have to see how the prospective employee conducts themselves and you have to get him or her off script. You can’t do this if you haven’t done your homework. Even if it’s only one or two questions. You have to prepare in advance. Again, block of at least a half hour on your calendar and use the time to research the candidate.

Know Exactly What You’re Looking for

You’re not just putting a body in a chair. Every hire is a huge opportunity to forward your firm’s strategies. This means you have a clear understanding of the tasks expected of the position but more importantly the results and how the candidate will be held accountable for those results. Only with this context established can you look at past experience and see if the candidate will be a good fit.

It’s Not about You

It’s a really bad sign when the interview’s focus moves away from the interviewee and onto the hiring manager. It sounds silly but it happens all the time. People like to talk about themselves, and it’s good to share a little, but the interview has to be about the position and the candidate. Everything else is tangential at best.

Hiring takes time. It’s not easy, and for many, it’s simply stressful and unfun. But if you do it right, it’s likely that you’ll be doing it less. Or at least you’ll be doing it for happier reasons, and it’s like anything else, you’ll get better at it. But you’ve got to put the time in.

About NextGen

NextGen is the brainchild of longtime telecom professionals with nearly 50 years of experience and millions of dollars in Telecom Recruiting Services. We focus on establishing long term relationships with our clients and candidates so we can recruit the best and the brightest in the telecom industry. This ‘quality over quantity’ approach is at the heart of everything we do and has resulted in successful job placements at Fortune 1000 firms worldwide.