How to Honour Candidates in the Interview Stage
Last week, I wrote about how employers can honour candidates in the application stage (https://www.christianjobs.co.uk/news/how-honour-candidates-application-stage). The next stage of a recruitment campaign is the interview stage. Very rough estimations suggest that around 20% of candidates who apply for a position are offered an interview. Therefore, it’s a great opportunity for Christian employers to serve and honour potential employees.
Why Interview?
Interviews form an important part of most recruitment processes. Often, the interview is the first opportunity that a candidate gets to speak to their potential new employer and vice versa. They are vital as hiring managers seek to learn more about candidates; their experience, how they communicate and their character, but also interviews allow candidates to hear more about the organisation they’re hoping to work for; the culture, the staff structure, the history. Nowadays, interviews are more and more frequently being carried out remotely, over video calls, although most organisations will have at least some face-to-face contact with candidates before offering the position.
Be Open and Honest
This should go without saying, but if you’re looking to hire someone, you want them to be open and honest about their past experience. At the very least, the same should be expected from the interviewing panel. Usually, candidates will ask questions and it’s important to give as much information and insight to the applicants as possible. In an ideal scenario, at the end of the interview stage, the hiring manager needs to have certainty as to which candidate they’d like to offer the position to and the successful candidate needs to have certainty as to whether or not they would accept the position should they be offered it.
Be Flexible
More often than not, when people apply for jobs, they already have an existing position. Even if they are unemployed, there are often childcare constraints or other commitments that limit their availability for an interview. If hiring organisations need to hold interviews on a set day, make sure that candidates are informed of that date as far in advance as possible, ideally on the job advert. However, where practical, it can really help candidates if you’re able to be flexible with the interview date and time so that you can find a time that both suits them and you. For first-stage interviews especially, video interviews can be very helpful and much more accessible for lots of jobseekers.
Give Feedback
In our 2023 Recruitment Report, we asked 280 professing Christians how Christian employers could better serve them throughout the recruitment process. 20.6% of candidates said they felt that employers should provide better feedback. I talked about this last week in relation to giving feedback to candidates after the application stage but it’s absolutely crucial to provide thorough feedback after the interview stage. Candidates often pour a lot into interviews; time, effort and focus. Often, especially within the Christian sector, their interviews will be very personal (92% of candidates in our survey suggested that Christian Recruitment processes were more personal than secular processes) and candidates may share intimate testimonies of what God has done in their life. It can be crushing for candidates to then be rejected without clear reason and not given any pointers so that they can improve interview performance for the next role that they apply for.
Candidates - Turn Up
So far, I have focussed only on what organisations can do to make sure that candidates are honoured and treated as though they are created in the image of God. But, this needs to go both ways and be reciprocated by job applicants. Some US companies reported a couple of years ago that 90% of candidates offered interviews, didn’t turn up to them. In my experience, when recruiting on behalf of different organisations, we find the opposite at Christian Jobs. More than 95% of candidates attend scheduled interviews and it’s incredibly rare that we have a no-show without good reason. It is something that we hear about though from organisations seeking to hire.
If you have any tips for interviewing candidates, any specific questions you always ask or other ways that you support candidates, I’d love to hear! Please email me at joe.santry@christianjobs.co.uk or message me on LinkedIn.