Top Tip 4: Interview Techniques - How to Get the Best Out of Candidates

Foxgroves Recruitment Confessions blog has been hijacked by our Employer Top Tips Mini Series! In this 6 week series, we're sharing practical, no-nonsense tips to help you hire smarter, retain better, and stop making the same recruitment mistakes everyone else is making.

Imagine you're on a first date. You've made an effort. You've thought about what you want to say. You've turned up curious about the other person. And for the next hour, they talk solidly about themselves. Their hobbies. Their last relationship. Their views on the news. They ask you nothing.

Not one question.

How would you feel walking away from that date? You probably wouldn't be ringing them up for a second one.

That, more or less, is what some interviews look like from the candidate's side. And the most extraordinary thing is, the employers running them often have no idea.

A few weeks ago a candidate told me, with genuine bewilderment, that he'd just attended an interview where he wasn't asked a single question. Not one. The interviewer talked at her for an hour. About the business. About their plans. About their team. He nodded politely, never opened his CV, never got asked about his experience, and walked out wondering what on earth had just happened.

He didn't take the next step. Of course he didn't. Why would he?

Let's talk about how to actually run an interview.

The Vibes Trap

Most employers think they're good at interviewing because they're good at having a conversation. That's the problem.

Interviews based on "feel" and "vibes" sound lovely on paper. Relaxed. Authentic. Letting personalities come through. In reality, they're a hiring minefield. Because when you've made a decision based on how someone felt rather than what they demonstrated, you can't actually justify that decision. Not to yourself. Not to your team. And definitely not to the candidates you reject.

Here's the question I'd ask any employer who tells me they prefer interviews to "flow naturally." How are you fairly selecting between two candidates if you've not assessed both of them against the actual job requirements? How are you going to give feedback to the unsuccessful one? "We just got a better feeling from the other person" isn't feedback. It's a polite way of saying you didn't really know what you were measuring.

Good interviews have structure. Good interviewers have warmth and curiosity inside that structure. You can absolutely have both.

Preparation Is the Whole Game

If there's one thing that separates a good interviewer from a mediocre one, it's the time spent before the candidate walks in.

Read the CV. Properly. Not the morning of the interview while you're making a coffee. Sit down with it in advance, take notes, mark the things you want to ask about. Google the companies they've worked for, especially the ones you don't recognise. Understand the trajectory of their career so you can have a proper conversation about it.

If there's more than one interviewer, sit down beforehand and agree the structure. Who's asking what. Who's leading. Who's note-taking. Who's covering competence, who's covering culture, who's covering questions about the role. There's nothing worse for a candidate than three interviewers all asking variations of the same question because nobody bothered to align.

And the questions themselves should be agreed in advance. Not so you ask them robotically, but so the candidate gets a fair, consistent experience and you've got something to actually compare across multiple interviews.

The Interrupters

While we're on the subject of things candidates tell me afterwards, here's a regular one. A candidate of mine recently shared that she'd been asked to talk through her CV at interview. She got as far as her first job, was cut off mid-sentence, and the interviewer moved on. She never got the chance to finish. They never came back to it. She walked out feeling like the interviewer hadn't actually wanted to hear about her career.

Interrupting candidates is one of the most common interview habits I see, and most interviewers don't even realise they're doing it. It often happens because the interviewer is focused on getting through their list of questions rather than properly listening to the answers. The candidate is mid-flow on something useful, the interviewer jumps in with the next item on their list, and a thread that might have led somewhere interesting gets cut off forever.

Let them finish. Pause after they've answered. You'll be amazed what they'll add in the silence.

Active Listening Is Where the Gold Is

The best interviewers don't just stick rigidly to their question list. They listen to the answers, and they ask follow-ups that the script never anticipated.

I had a client recently, a really experienced interviewer, who had a candidate in front of him for a Marketing Manager role. About 20 minutes into the interview, the candidate mentioned in passing that she'd done a six-month secondment the previous year covering ecommerce and SEO. It barely featured on her CV. A less attentive interviewer would have nodded and moved on.

But he was listening properly. He asked her to talk about that secondment in detail. What she'd done, what she'd delivered, what she'd loved about it. By the end of the interview, he wasn't thinking about her for the Marketing Manager role at all. He had an ecommerce and SEO specialist vacancy coming up that she was actually a far better fit for. She got that job, loves it, is thriving in it.

That entire outcome happened because the interviewer was actually listening. Not chasing his next question. Not glancing at his notes. Listening. And then asking the follow-up.

Structured questions don't have to mean rigid questions. The structure is there to make sure you cover what you need to cover. But within that, leave room for the conversation to breathe. Some of the most valuable information you'll ever get in an interview comes from a follow-up question that wasn't on your list.

Asking Questions That Actually Reveal Capability

You don't need to go full competency-based to ask good questions. You just need to ask questions that tie back to the actual job.

Instead of "are you good with Excel?" try "the role involves a lot of Excel work, can you walk me through how you use Excel in your current role to support your day-to-day tasks?" The first question gets you a yes. The second one gets you the truth.

Same principle across the board. Don't ask if they're organised, ask them to describe how they manage their workload when they've got three competing priorities. Don't ask if they can handle difficult conversations, ask them to tell you about a recent one they had to navigate. Real questions tied to real work give you real answers.

And then, for the love of everything, listen to the answer.

The Gut Feel Hire

I want to be honest about this. Gut feel hires occasionally work out. But more often they don't, and when they go wrong, they go wrong expensively.

The bigger problem is what gut feel does to your rejection conversations. If you can't articulate why someone wasn't right beyond "we just clicked more with the other person," you're going to give terrible feedback. Or no feedback. And the candidates you've rejected, who took half a day out to come and meet you, deserve better than that.

A structured interview that ties back to the job lets you give honest, specific feedback. A gut-feel one doesn't. That alone is reason enough to plan properly.

Close It Properly

One more thing, because it matters more than employers realise.

How you close an interview shapes how the candidate feels walking out, and how they remember the experience for weeks afterwards. So many candidates leave interviews on cloud nine, convinced they've got it, only to be informed four weeks later by a generic rejection email that they weren't successful.

That's a horrible experience. It's also entirely avoidable.

At the end of every interview, tell the candidate clearly what happens next. How many other people you're seeing. When you expect to make a decision. When and how you'll be in touch. And then actually do those things, on time. If something delays you, drop them a quick line to say so. Two minutes of effort. Massive difference in how they think of your company afterwards. And by the way, even rejected candidates are future customers, future referrers, and sometimes future colleagues.

Take This Further

To help you run better interviews, I've put together the fourth resource in the Foxgroves Employer Toolkit: The Interview Toolkit. It includes a preparation checklist, a structured question bank, a scoring framework, and a closing template. Designed to make sure every interview you run is fair, useful, and genuinely reveals whether the person in front of you is right for the job. Download it for FREE here.

What This Means in Practice

Good interviewing is a skill. It's not something everyone is naturally good at, and it's absolutely something that can be learned and improved.

If your interviews are happening because someone needs to be hired, and the line manager has been pencilled in to interview because they're the line manager, you're rolling the dice. Invest some time in your interview process. Train the people doing it. Agree the questions before each one. Listen properly. Close it properly.

You'll hire better. You'll reject more fairly. And the candidates you don't hire will speak about your company in a way that makes the next person more likely to apply, not less.

If you'd like to talk through your interview process, or you've got a hiring manager who could do with some structure, drop me a message. Genuinely happy to chat it through.

Until next Sunday,

Lyndsey