14 Unique Interview Techniques and Their Advantages
In a changing recruitment landscape, many hiring managers are exploring unique interview techniques to better understand candidate skills and facilitate the best hiring decisions. A departure from traditional interview tactics also enables a more thorough assessment of aspects such as soft skills and culture fit, which are increasingly crucial in the hiring decision-making process.
These innovative approaches are designed to show the candidate's adaptability, creativity, and critical thinking skills along with their experience and hard skill set. If you’re interested in learning more about a departure from traditional interviewing strategies, this article covers some of the most popular unique interview techniques, highlighting how they can provide a more comprehensive evaluation of talent in today's competitive job market.
Can Unique Interview Techniques Make It Easy to Highlight the Best Candidate
Unique interview techniques can be an excellent way to effectively highlight the best candidate for a position. Traditional interviews often follow a predictable pattern, and candidates may come prepared with rehearsed answers.
Employing innovative and unique interview techniques, even when combined with more traditional interviews, can help you gain deeper insights into a candidate's skills, personality, and cultural fit. In better understanding each candidate’s experience, workplace personality, critical thinking skills, and more via unique interview strategies, choosing the ideal candidate for the job is easier and more likely to be successful.
Using unique interview techniques can make it more likely that you’ll hire the best candidate.
14 Unique Interview Techniques To Implement
1. Behavioral Interviewing
Many interview questions focus on how candidates would handle hypothetical future situations. While this can be useful to determine how they will deal with situations that arise at your organization, asking questions based on past behavior are also helpful to include in your interview question rotation.
Ask candidates to give some examples of how they have handled different situations in previous roles, encouraging use of the STAR technique (situation, task, action, and result). This more common unique interview technique helps to assess a candidate's actual experience and problem-solving abilities and acts as an enhancement to the skills and responsibilities highlighted in their resume.
2. Case Interviews and Presentations
Another of the unique interview techniques that’s a little more well-known is the use of case studies or interview presentations. Provide a case study in the interview related to the position the candidate is interviewing for. Then, assess how they respond to it after some preparation time.
If you aren’t highly interested in seeing how they respond on the spot, you could provide the case study in advance and ask them to create an interview presentation highlighting how they would tackle the situation.
By implementing this technique, you can assess problem-solving skills and decision-making abilities while seeing how they would respond to realistic scenarios they will face in the role.
3. Role-specific Tests and Tasks
In place of a more in-depth case study, you could provide a role-specific task or test during the interview, such as a small coding test, design task, or writing assignment. Do note, that if the response is more in-depth, you may need to provide some compensation or create a contract that says their work will not be used by the organization.
As with case study presentations, this tests problem-solving skills and shows how they will respond to a real-world task. It also demonstrates proficiency in the skills outlined on their resume. A role-specific test can be more suitable than a case study when hiring entry-level candidates and other more junior roles.
Interview presentations demonstrate how candidates perform and present themselves with preparation.
4. Group Interviews
Generally, interviews are conducted by HR team members, execs or department higher-ups. However, a unique interview technique that could be of benefit in at least one interview during the process is group interviewing. This tactic involves having multiple team members from the department the candidate will work in present in the interview to interact with them and ask questions.
Include the people they will work closest with, even if that includes entry-level employees like assistants. Try to create a laid-back and conversational atmosphere so that the candidate doesn’t feel overwhelmed.
In utilizing this technique, you can get a more holistic view of the candidate’s interpersonal skills and culture fit with your existing team. After the interview, you can learn how the employees that will work closely with the candidate feel about them. This is crucial as you don’t want to decrease current employee satisfaction by bringing on a team member that doesn’t gel with them.
5. Cultural Fit Interviews
An important factor to look at when interviewing is on-paper vs. cultural fit of candidates. If culture fit is important to your organization, consider hosting cultural fit interviews, even if you accompany this type of interview with a more traditional one.
In these interviews, you’ll use questions to assess candidate alignment with company culture and discover their work preferences, how they would handle specific workplace situations, and how they get on and bond with co-workers.
6. Strengths-Based Interviews
Many interviews feature questions that focus on weaknesses, emphasizing questions centered around strengths can be significantly more beneficial in identifying the most suitable candidate for the job.
This unique interview technique asks candidates to discuss situations in which they had their best successes, encompassing both minor accomplishments and contributions to more substantial projects. When using this technique, also pose questions that allow the candidate to discuss successes connected to hard and soft skills, allowing you to fully assess their capabilities.
7. Future-Oriented Questions
An alternate option to the previously discussed technique of asking how candidates acted in past situations is to ask future-oriented questions. Determine how they will tackle new problems they’ll likely encounter in the role to gauge forward-thinking, on-the-spot problem solving, and creativity.
You can also use these types of questions to discover how they innovate. For example, by asking what they would do to improve or advance current products, services, or processes (that they’re aware of) at the company.
Conducting group interviews allow you to see how the candidate acts around those they will be working with the most.
8. Speed Interviews
An interesting first or last interview option is to conduct brief, highly focused interviews (around five to 10 minutes long) that allow you to quickly assess a candidate's communication skills, confidence, and ability to articulate their thoughts and work experience concisely. When implementing this unique interview technique, opt for phone or video call interviews or do it as an introduction to a longer in-person interview.
By using this technique as a first interview step, you can rapidly gather the information you need to assess which candidates are best to move on to the next step. As a final interview step, you can quickly find out some additional pieces of information on the candidate and their experience that can help you with making a hiring decision.
9. Job Shadowing Day
A unique interview technique that can be very useful near the end of the hiring process is job shadowing. Have your best candidates shadow an employee in a similar role, letting them get hands-on experience and allowing you to assess how they fit into the team and perform in the role.
If implementing this tactic, it is best practice to compensate candidates for their time and only put job shadowing in place if it works with the schedules of all candidates. For example, if the majority of candidates are currently employed, a full or half-day job shadowing will probably not be possible. Instead, opt for an hour-long virtual job shadowing task or some of the other unique interview techniques on this list that better meet candidate schedules.
10. Mock Client Meeting
If the role involves client interactions, organize a mock client meeting where the candidate has to present a solution or discuss a project. This unique interview technique simulates a real-world scenario and reveals their client-facing skills.
11. Personal Pitch
An alternative to the case study-based interview presentation is to ask candidates to prepare a personal pitch. Instead of presenting on a work-based case study, they will present on themselves, highlighting strengths, experience, their personality, and why they’re perfect for the position.
This can be an excellentunique interview technique to implement for junior candidates who may lack the experience needed to present on a more in-depth case study. If your organization places significant emphasis on cultural fit, you may want to use this interview technique for all candidates as it showcases communication skills, self-awareness, and workplace personality.
Job shadowing offers good insight into how a candidate will perform in the role.
12. Reverse Interview
Allowing the candidate to take the lead by asking questions about the company, team dynamics, and the challenges they might face in the role is another unique interview strategy to consider. This tactic can generally be combined with a more traditional interview or some of the other techniques discussed in this list.
While most will ask the candidate if they have any questions at the end of the interview, encourage them to ask multiple questions. It can be a good idea to mention before the interview that the meeting will have this reverse question section and ask them to prepare some questions in advance. Let them know that they can also make notes during the rest of the interview if any questions come to mind. Including a question element like this can demonstrate the candidate’s research skills and interest in the organization.
13. Innovation Challenge
To uncover how innovative candidates can be, present them with a current or hypothetical challenge the company is facing and ask for their ideas on how to solve it. This is a great way to assess their critical thinking and ability to contribute to problem-solving. It works well for candidates applying to creative and strategic roles or any other area where innovation and problem-solving will be a predominant part of the job.
14. Random Scenario Generator
A more casual and fun unique interview technique is to use a random scenario generator tool to present candidates with unexpected situations. This tests their adaptability, quick thinking, and ability to handle ambiguity. As with some of the other options in this list, highlight that the answer they give isn’t that important. Instead, you want to see the process they use to get to a solution.
In Conclusion
If you’re looking to optimize your interview strategy, there are many unique interview techniques to test out. Combining some of these techniques with traditional interview tactics can help you to learn more about candidates, their experience, and how they will fit into the role and organization.
Remember to tailor these techniques to the specific requirements of the job and industry. The goal is to create an interview experience that not only evaluates skills and qualifications but also reveals the candidate's personality, cultural fit, and potential for growth within your organization. Even if it’s as simple as incorporating an interview presentation or emphasizing reverse questioning, unique interview strategies can help you discover top talent to add to your team.