One of the worst aspects of hiring is having to interview candidates. Managers find that this is the most intimidating and time-consuming area, and they waste hours of valuable management time seeing inappropriate candidates.

The way people behave when they leave their current job to come and work for you is a critical piece of information that can be very valuable. One of the very best open ended interviewing questions that you can ask is how much notice the applicant has to give their employer before they can start their employment with you.

When you have a pile of resumes and you start to wade through them, it is folly to think that it is a good idea to see very many candidates. There are at least three excellent reasons why I say this: 

The following form can be used to guide your phone screening conversation and also serve as a place to enter you interview notes.

We hire employees for what they know and fire them (eventually) for who they are. The interview process should be designed to overturn this dynamic and allow us to find out who the real person is, but it seldom turns out that way.

One of the most common mistakes that I see people making in the interviewing process is that they talk more than they listen and end up telling the candidate about the company rather than finding out about the candidate.

Part of this goes back to the last issue, not having a well-thought out interview process. Once you have the process set out, it is easier to start thinking about what questions you would like to ask at what stage in the process and then to integrate those questions into your process.   

One of the most common mistakes that I see made in interviewing is what I call "the high I syndrome", where people hire candidates that they like rather than people who are suited to the job they are trying to fill.