Many companies today are working hard on improving their quality of hire.
In that regard, the peer interview can add a lot of value to the recruitment and selection
process, helping companies get a comprehensive view of their candidates.
In this video, we take a deep dive into peer interviews, their pros and cons, and how to
design an effective peer interview process in 9 steps.
Before we dive into the topic, however, as always, remember to subscribe to the
channel, hit the notification bell and smash the like button!
*MUSIC*
Hi, Neelie here again with yet another episode of our Learning Bites.
Before we dive deeper into the topic, we invite you to download our Peer review Interview
guide checklist!
You can find the link below in the comments!
So what is a peer interview?
As the name suggests, it’s an interview between a candidate and their future colleagues.
Companies like Facebook, Google, and Gitlab are known to use this practice to assess
culture fit.
While there certainly are risks involved when it comes to peer interviewing - it can be
time consuming or biased for example, we believe that the benefits outweigh the negatives.
Peer interviewing improves candidate experience, by giving candidates an accurate impression
of the organization, it gives you multiple perspectives on the candidate, and it helps
empower your current employees, who now share the responsibility of hiring their future
colleague.
If you’d like to give peer interviews a shot, here are 9 steps to follow to create
a peer interview process that works for your organization.
Develop a standardized process
This is your starting point.
Consider creating an interview guide but specifically for peer interviews.
Among other things, this will help you structure the entire process and ensure as much of an
equal assessment and candidate experience as possible.
Determine who participates in the process
There’s no need to have more than two or three employees conduct a peer interview.
It is, however, important which people to choose for this.
Elements to take into account when building your peer interview team include:
How engaged or happy they are in their job How well they perform
Whether or not they demonstrate organizational citizenship behavior
Including people from diverse backgrounds in your peer interview panel will help you
take different perspectives into account, creating a more holistic view of a candidate.
Set clear requirements and evaluation criteria
The employee interviewers who are involved in the interview process need to understand
two things upfront:
the requirements and expectations of the candidate you are looking to hire and;
the system for how to evaluate candidates
It’s important that your peer interview team understands how the candidate requirements
translate to actual behaviors so that they can assess them.
The interviewers need to know what to look for in candidates’ answers.
Adding examples in the interview guide is useful, as well as touching on this during
the interview training.
In addition, using an interview scorecard is a good way to get feedback on how well
the candidate fits the job and the organizational culture.
Once each peer has assessed the applicants individually they can discuss the evaluation
with their peers, the recruiter, and the hiring manager.
Prepare relevant peer interview questions
This is something that a recruiter or hiring manager needs to do together with the employees
involved in the interview process.
Peers will notice different aspects of an applicant’s experience, skills, and mentality
than a hiring manager.
They look at a candidate through the eyes of someone who has to do the job on a daily basis.
This is an extremely valuable perspective during the hiring process.
So let your employees take the lead in preparing the peer interview questions.
Once the employee questions are done and agreed upon, add them to the peer interview guide
to make sure that each candidate gets the same questions in the same order.
This will help you maintain a consistent interview structure.
Train your interviewers
Training your interviewers is essential for several reasons.
Perhaps the most important one is to make them aware of their own biases.
Bias can easily creep into the hiring process.
We all have a tendency to get along (better) with those who are like us for example.
So without even knowing it, we might become a victim of our own affinity bias when interviewing
candidates.
But there’s more to interview training than increasing people’s awareness of biases.
Think, for instance, of basics interview etiquette, which includes being on time, introducing
yourself, etc.
For someone who has never interviewed a candidate before, going over the fundamentals can be
very useful (if not necessary).
Interviewers also need to learn how to build rapport with a candidate.
And then there is the legal and ethical side of things.
What questions are okay to ask and what questions aren’t, Train your employees on this, quiz
them on it, and regularly provide refreshers.
Create a pleasant setting
Let candidates know beforehand who they will be meeting and what the purpose of the interview is.
This will help to reduce the interview stress.
Given the current situation in a lot of countries, it will be hard to conduct in-person interviews
and to consistently ensure the same setting.
You can, however, set some (basic) guidelines for your interviewers and help them create
a smooth remote interview experience.
A few examples to include in your peer interview guide:
Test your equipment beforehand Prepare a backup (make sure you have the candidate’s
email and phone number handy in case you have a technical issue)
Switch off all notifications and chats to minimize distractions
Have the candidate’s resume and interview questions ready
Leave space for candidate questions
Candidate questions can give you a better sense of the candidate’s motivation for
the job, factors that are important to them, their values, possible deal-breakers, and so on.
Therefore, it’s important to create room for applicant questions during the peer interview
and to prepare your interviewers for typical questions candidates could ask.
Choose wisely when to conduct the peer interviews
Conducting a peer interview demands a considerable amount of time from employees so the hiring
managers should choose wisely when to ask their team members for one.
Typically, peer interviews would take place towards the end of the selection process.
And you can schedule it on the day the candidate has other interviews, for example, with the management.
On a more practical note, it’s important to give employees enough time to prepare without
slowing down the hiring process.
A balancing act that isn’t always easy to get right.
Continue iterating the peer interview process
Once the interview process is over, gather feedback from your candidates – both from
those who weren’t hired and those who were – and your employees.
Based on their feedback you can make adjustments to the process.
For example, maybe you’ll find out that the interviews are too long and that you need
a time limit or maybe they take place too early in the process.
And that’s it for this episode.
Remember to download our checklist down below and let us know what your interview strategies
are, in the comments section.
See you soon for another episode! Bye!