How to Evaluate Candidates After Interviews

Evaluating candidates after structured interviews can be difficult in any environment, but it is especially challenging when you hire remotely.

Remote work and remote hiring are here to stay. 82% of employers surveyed in a recent Indeed survey uses virtual interviews and 93% will continue. So, not only is remote working the new normal; remote hiring is as well, which is why your method of post-interview evaluation must accommodate both. 

While there are some benefits to conducting interviews virtually (such as being able to reach a wider pool of candidates), there are also some drawbacks.

One of the biggest drawbacks of conducting interviews virtually is that it’s harder to get to know the candidate on a personal level. Body language and other nonverbal cues are essential for understanding how someone is feeling, and these cues are much harder to pick up on when you’re not conducting an in-person interview. An interview in a remote environment requires careful consideration and attention to detail.

In order to make an informed decision and provide a level playing field for all candidates, you need a system set in place to help you hire and recruit the candidate that is best for your organization. We all know that hiring the wrong candidate can be costly in the short and long run. The time that it takes to train someone new, and the decrease in productivity, while they are getting up to speed, can set your organization back.

The best way to avoid making a bad hire is by using a combination of assessment tools to help you identify the candidate that is the best fit for the position. It is more important than ever to have a system in place to evaluate candidates after an interview.

In this article, we cover why the post-interview evaluation is so important and how any company can conduct a proper post-interview evaluation to help identify the perfect candidate.

How to Assess Candidates After the Interview

Every business is different. While one business might hold items like “cultural fit” in high regard, another company might view “technical skills” as a more desirable trait.

For a successful post-interview evaluation to occur, those in charge of making the hiring decision need to sit down and define how the final candidates will be judged.

Below are examples of criteria that businesses use while conducting a post-interview evaluation:

• Educational background
• Relevant work experience
• Specific skills or “technical skills”
• Ability to work in a team environment
• Leadership skills
• Critical thinking and problem solving
• Communication skills
• Attitude and motivation
• Quality references
• Body language
• Social media/web presence

So how do you decide which items to use?

Hire based on a prioritized list of skills (both hard and soft) needed for the job with an evaluation form. If you’re hiring for a technical position, such as a software developer, examine what the day-to-day would be like for that individual. Will they need to interact with others? Will they need to be able to effectively communicate through email? Is there a specific skill set that your company desperately needs and is required for the position?

Once you decide on your evaluation criteria, it’s time to form an official post-interview evaluation process that includes the problems your organization is looking to solve and share it with all parties involved in future hiring efforts.

Five Key Factors to Evaluate Candidates On

Candidates go through a lot of trouble to prepare for an interview. However, the interview panel often has a hard time making a decision because they are not sure what they should be looking for. There are five factors that are the most important when evaluating candidates after an interview:

1. How well the candidate handled unexpected interview questions: This shows how adaptable and resourceful the candidate is.
2. How well the candidate answered questions: This shows how well the candidate understands the role and the company.
3. The body language of the candidate: This shows how confident and comfortable the candidate is.
4. The energy level of the candidate: This shows how enthusiastic and passionate the candidate is about the role.
5. How well the candidate engaged with the interview panel: This shows how personable and likable the candidate is, and is a good indication if they will fit in with the team dynamics.

How to Assess Soft Skills?

Evaluating candidates for their soft skills can feel tricky, especially when it’s done remotely. How can you get a sense of someone’s true personality over Zoom? Or figure out if they’ll be a good culture fit for your team when you’re not in the same room? 

It’s important to remember that interviews are only one tool in the candidate evaluation process, and there are a few different ways to go about assessing soft skills. 

Use Evaluation Criteria

To properly evaluate a candidate, develop specific criteria that focus on key indicators, such as: 

• Was the candidate prepared for the interview? 

• Did they express knowledge of what your company does? 

• Did they answer questions thoroughly? 

• Did they ask thoughtful questions about the company? 

• How clearly did they communicate their experience and strengths? 

• Are they confident in themselves?

Involve Multiple Interviewers

Another option is to have multiple people interview the candidate, with each person focusing on a different skill set (e.g., communication, adaptability, team collaboration). This can help give you a more well-rounded sense of the candidate and their abilities. This approach can also reduce individual bias and provide better insight into the candidate’s potential fit within your team.

How to Assess Hard Skills?

Evaluating candidates for a specific skill can be difficult if you don’t have any relevant work examples or real-world scenarios to gauge their knowledge and skillset. That’s why it’s important to discuss and evaluate real-world experience situations. This will give you a better understanding of their thought process and whether they are truly knowledgeable about the subject matter.

Use Real-World Scenarios  

Ask the candidate to walk you through how they would handle a realistic situation related to the job. 

How to do it: 

• Present a common challenge they might face on the job. 

• Ask open-ended questions to explore their thinking, decision-making, and technical depth. 

• Encourage them to describe tools they’d use or any unique approaches they might take.

Assign a Small Test or Project 

Another way to evaluate a candidate’s skills is to give them a test. This will allow you to see their actual work, in action.

How to do it: 

• Introduce and ask about scenarios that test decision-making, prioritization, and judgment. 

• Assign a task that reflects the job responsibilities, and ask for them to complete it.

The Importance of Post-Interview Assessments

These days, it’s more common for companies to use an online assessment tool or app when it comes to hiring and recruiting. This not only saves time and money by cutting down on travel expenses but also helps candidates feel connected with the company they’re interviewing with since most of them will have done their research beforehand!

Evaluating candidates after an interview is essential to the fairness and success of the hiring process and can offer value that an interview cannot. With a post-interview evaluation process, those in charge of making the hiring decision have a set of criteria that they can use to make their final decision. This will speed up the process of onboarding a qualified candidate, reducing the time and cost of hiring.

Tips To Help Assess Candidates After Interviews

While having a post-interview evaluation process in place can greatly improve the quality of new hires at your company, there is unfortunately no surefire method for predicting how a candidate will perform once they’re engaged with their assigned tasks.

But what you can do is make sure you have an effective interview process that helps you assess candidates after the interview. Here are a few import tips to follow:

1. Use a set of predetermined questions in the interview process. This helps by allowing the hiring manager to collect the same information across multiple interviewers. This makes it much easier to see and avoid biases.
2. Use interview scorecards to allow hiring managers to rank candidates. This enables interviewers to compare all of the variables necessary for success in a particular role. When used over a period of time, you can begin to see a pattern in how high or low a certain interviewer usually rates candidates. If somebody’s average score is a 3 out of 5, and they give a candidate a 4, it would be worthwhile to dive deeper and see what made this candidate stand out.
3. Collect more than enough information during the interview. If you haven’t provided your interview team with a standardized list of skills, qualifications, and characteristics to look for during the interview process, then it is unlikely that you will receive quality hiring manager feedback that will help you determine the best candidate for the job. As with avoiding biases, having a portion of your interview standardized across given criteria is a great way to ensure you gather specific data that can be compared across all candidates.

Using these tips will help you reduce bias during evalutation, which can help create a better and more productive workplace.

How Paycor Helps

One of the most important challenges businesses face today is finding, interviewing, and hiring talented people – especially in a remote world. Any interruption in your recruiting process reduces your time to hire and can cost you time and money, but so can hiring the wrong candidate. Paycor Recruiting, designed by recruiters for recruiters and HR teams, helps you optimize your recruiting process and enables you to identify the best candidates for your company in record time. 

With this valuable tool, you’ll be able to hire the most talented people for your business and build a strong team that can take your company to the next level!