Introduction
Interview Guides are incredibly helpful to Hiring Managers and other interviewers because they provide them with a way to structure their interviews and ask science-backed questions that are relevant to both the role the candidate is applying for, as well as the specific candidate’s personality fit for this job. Harver’s interview guide helps give the interviewer insight into what areas they should dig into in the interview because the questions themselves are generated based on how the candidate scored on the Personality Print assessment. Harver’s Interview Guide also gives the interviewer the ability to take notes on the candidate’s responses and log them directly in the system so they can be reviewed later when making a hiring decision.
Navigation
After an Interview Questions Template has been created and associated to a vacancy, any candidate that completes the journey for this vacancy will have an interview guide generated for the Hiring Manager or other interviewer. This Interview Guide is accessible from the Candidate’s Detail Page (see below). When the “Open” button is clicked, the Interview Guide will open in a new tab in the user’s browser window.
Interview Guide Structure
The Interview Guide is composed of a few main components:
Personal Information
Name, email address, and phone number of the candidate. This information is only available to those users who have access to PII and only for those candidates who complete flows where the Personal Information module is utilized. For users who don’t have PII, we allow them to open the guide and hide the PII in the header using asterisks, but we do not allow them to print the guide (View PDF button is hidden). If the flow does not contain the personal information module, only the email address will be listed on the guide, because no other information is captured out-of-the-box.
Introductory Info
The Interview Guide header and description are displayed on every interview guide. This is just a brief description of what an Interview Guide is used for.
Interview Questions
There are 3 types of questions that can be displayed in the guide, based on how the template is configured. Examples of these are listed below and depicted in the following screenshots:
General Interview Questions
These are questions that administrative users (typically recruiters or talent acquisition leads) can add to their template to be asked by interviewers in every guide that gets populated for this vacancy. Click here to learn more about configuring these or any questions on the guide.
Competency-based Questions
These are questions that were created by our people scientists (one for each competency in the matching profile that’s associated to the vacancy). If these questions are turned on in the template settings, they will display on any guide generated for this vacancy.
Trait-based Questions
These are questions are also created by our people scientists, and they are generated based on how this unique candidate responded to their assessment. If a trait question is populated on the guide, it is displayed because (1) the trait is defined in one of the matching indicators on the matching profile, (2) the trait-based questions are turned on in the interview template settings, and (3) the candidate scored outside the ideal score range (either above or below the range). The generated question is different based on whether the trait is considered an upper or lower weakness for the candidate (upper weakness means the candidate scored above the ideal score range and lower weakness means they scored below the ideal score range). Each question also comes with a “hint” of what to listen for in the candidate’s response. Also, if the trait exists within a competency-based matching indicator, the interviewer is provided with information about which competencies this question/trait is related to.
Starting an Interview
You’ll notice in the screenshots above that a banner displays over the top of the guide with a question that asks if you’re ready to “start the interview”. By clicking the “Start Interview” button, the interviewer is freezing the current state of the interview guide at that moment, as well as giving themselves access to the note-taking feature of the interview guide. The reason we have the concept of “freezing” the interview guide is that up until this point, any changes made by an admin-level user to the Interview Questions Template that was used to generate this guide will continue to populate on the guide until the interview has been started. Once you start the interview and begin to take notes on the responses, we don’t want those changes to Interview Questions to impact guides that have already been used in an interview, so this is why we ask the user to “Start” the interview.
Note-Taking
One of the capabilities of Interview Guides in Harver that sets it apart from existing functionality in Outmatch Assess is the ability to add and capture notes on the candidate's responses to the questions. As stated in the previous section, starting an interview allows the interviewer access to note-taking fields under each question. This is super handy for recording what their thoughts are on-the-fly and being able to come back to them later as they’re reviewing all the candidates they’ve interviewed and trying to make a hiring decision.
Saving Notes
When the interviewer is ready to save the notes they’ve added, all they need to do is click the “Save guide” button on the bottom right and they’ll get confirmation that their changes were saved successfully.
Printing
No doubt, some of our clients will also want the ability to print out a guide and use it in an in-person, live interview. For this, we’ve created a “View PDF” button in the top right of the guide that will open a preview of a printer-friendly version in PDF format, complete with intelligent page breaks, and open spaces for notetaking. In addition to printing, users will also be able to download a PDF version of the guide. From there it can be printed later when they have access to a printer or shared via email or any other file sharing utility with other users who might be taking part in the interview. If any notes have already been taken on the guide digitally, these notes will be printed as well.
Once a guide has been generated for a candidate, users can return to the guide at any time by navigating to it from the Candidate Detail Page. The guide can never be deleted and will always be displayed for this candidate. Any notes taken on the guide will be permanently saved as well.
Please remember, that there is only one set of notes so if multiple users have the digital guide open taking notes on the interview at the same time, whoever clicks the Save button will save the guide in the state they have open. This means that users can accidentally overwrite each other. For this reason, it’s important that only one user is taking notes at a time when entering them digitally. Different users can just append their notes to the existing ones in each text field. If this comes up as a problem during user testing, especially if multiple users across clients find it problematic, a future update could include allowing notetaking from multiple interviewers at once and recording those notes intelligently.