The Effective Hiring Manager

13Physical Interview Setup

As a general rule, we don’t recommend putting a candidate in one conference room for the day of interviews. This often seems an efficient way of handling things, but candidates don’t like it. They feel sequestered. They comment afterward that they didn’t get a good feeling for the workplace. You won’t get better interviews, but you may get fewer offer acceptances.

If you must do this due to security concerns, that’s understandable. Tell the candidate why you’re doing it in advance. And make sure your interviewers know that this means they will have to work very hard to be promptly in some other place than their office/cubicles. There is an epidemic of lateness to meetings everywhere we go: Don’t let the candidate’s interviews just be “another meeting I can be late to” for your team.

A conference room is often chosen in open plan offices. But having an open plan office usually isn’t a good enough reason for the (bad) solution of using a conference room. You can conduct a great interview sitting in your open plan desk space. Others will hear parts of the interview, yes. But that’s what the candidate will experience if she comes to work for you. Interestingly, the latest version of conference rooms, often called “huddle rooms,” are even worse if the candidate stays there all day. Usually the rooms are unscheduled, so they’re available, but they’re just too small for a candidate to stay in all day. They can be a little claustrophobic.

If your open plan ...