The Freelance Recruiting Bible: Shortlisting and Preparing for Interviewing

Once you’ve advertised the job of someone else’s dreams, the next stage is to decide who is going to get the job. A formal way of doing this is shortlisting (taking the hopefully long list of candidates that applied, and narrowing it down to the ones that kind of meet the outline requirements you prepared earlier). You will have to move onto the next stage – interviewing. The world’s most uncomfortable one to one chat! To make sure it’s as pain free as possible, prepare, prepare, prepare. Here’s our pearls of preparatory wisdom to make it as pain free as possible for you!

Step 1 – Decide who and where you are going to interview – the ones you shortlisted – and set a time and date for your interviews. Try and make it in about a week or so, to give people time to arrange to get there. If you don’t have your own premises, it might be worth hiring a hotel room for the day/half day, or, many organizations do rent out space within their buildings for meetings and interviews. Try your local Chamber of Commerce, Business Link or even a local Job Centre, who may all be able to help you.

It can help to do interviews all on the same day, and to leave about 45 minutes between each. Set out your timetable of bods, and invite them along using the method best suited to you (telephone is usual, or send a letter for a more formal interview process). When inviting people to interview, tell them what to expect, for example; time, duration, paperwork needed (certs etc) Format of the interview, and let them know that if there are any special arrangements you need to make for them to attend the interview (this might be, for example, a written list of questions if problems with hearing) to let you know.

Step 2 – Decide what you want to know – Make a list if the questions you are going to ask. Favorite food/shoe size or if they saw the game/TV show should not be on the list! Aim the questions at making sure you are hiring someone who will respond well to the situations and challenges you know are part of your business. If you’re looking to hire a techie to go out and about, what about their customer care skills? What about their technical know how? (Do you want to test it?) How do they deal with tricky customers? If it’s a sales or admin job, can they work on their own initiative? Can they give you examples? You may only be a one-geek band, looking to expand, but if you look to recruit the best possible staff for the job, you’re going to reap the rewards of this time and time again. Conversely, a ‘start Monday if you have a pulse’ approach is really going to let you down!

Step 3 – Prepare your observation skills. Once you know what you want to know, some other factors come into play when interviewing. What dress code would you expect an employee to have? People attending an interview (even really cool or technical people) should dress like they are attending an interview or an important meeting (which it is) and not like they just rolled out of bed/an all night party. People are often nervous at interviews, which is expected and usual, however, you don’t want someone about to collapse with nerves, as, it’s likely they’re that nervous at other times too. Things to look out for, when you do start the formal interviews will be;

Step 4 – Practice. Body language is especially important – practice open body language – that is, arms not crossed, a relaxed (but not too relaxed!) posture. This will set the scene well, when the time comes to carry out the interview. Practice asking the questions, and think about what sort of information you should be looking for.

Step 5 – What about what they’ll ask you? Prepare some information about the job (you’ll have done this already if you followed our guides in sequence), the company (who knows it better than you?) and the terms and conditions of the job (pay, holidays etc.).

Interviews, when first employing people, can be quite intimidating. As a help to reducing this, plan as much as possible about the interview to cut down on the things that can go wrong. And remember, you’re going to be stuck with the bod you hired, maybe for a long time, so make sure you put the groundwork in, as this will help you make a good choice.

Next week – carrying out the interview!