You probably know how to skip the wait times for background checks and even filter applicants by soft skill to see only those you know will thrive in your available positions.

But when was the last time you updated the way you interview your candidates?

With the rise in the need for diverse teams and equitable treatment of employees coming to the fore in workplace environments, it’s more crucial now than ever before to ensure your interviewing processes are not only effective in finding the right candidate who is bound to stick with their position for the long run, but also in offering fair and unbiased decision-making processes for such.

To save you time and money on mis-hires and researching tricks for doing so yourself, here are our favorite tips to help you improve your interview process as an employer, recruiter, talent acquisition manager, or career coach.

1. Offer equal opportunity

For some candidates, the greatest fear in being asked to interview for a job is not getting the job; for others, it’s getting the job but for the wrong reasons.

And as a professional in the industry, you will have heard of hirers getting paid for employing a person of color or a person with a disability—also known as tokenism in the workplace—but how can you guarantee that you aren’t also guilty of doing so yourself, even if it’s coming from good intentions?

Start off on a good foot with your top contenders by showing them from the very get-go that you’re all for equity in the workplace and that you’re not just hiring them for—or that you’re not going to hire them because of—their race, gender, disability, religion, or sexual orientation. This means filtering for not keywords but soft skills that are shown to be evident in the potential candidate.

This can be done through soft skill assessments, like Packfinder, which through psychometric profiling offers employers and recruiters varying levels of close readings on a job applicant’s personality, work abilities, natural predispositions, and best-suited career paths for their greatest potential.

Psychometric profiling measures both the applicant’s soft skills and their internal responses to these questions, as well, so you know their answers are accurate and reliable every time.

2. Ask personalized questions

This may also seem obvious to you by now, but even the best fall into bad habits that are hard to beat.

Say, for example, the habit of asking where someone’s from, or asking if a candidate is married, has kids, or even what they do on the weekends.

These all seem and are in every other circumstance very harmless small-talk kinds of questions to ask, but in the context of a job interview, each of these questions can actually be perceived inappropriately and are even illegal to ask due to their connotations in discriminatory practices.

In fact, there is an entire list of questions you may be falling guilty of asking—just out of habit, and not intentionally at all!

And sometimes your standard questions run dry or lead you to a dead end in an interview, and there are still some aspects of the candidate that seem unclear about which you’re not sure how to go about finding out.

This can all be mediated simply by having a set of questions that are personalized based off of those handy summaries your candidate’s Packfinder results provide.

Within the Workwolf business platform, you can have access to view your candidates’ Packfinder results and discover more about them before you even interview them, so you know which questions to ask and get a better sense of who they are as a candidate.

With your top candidates’ Packfinder results, you’ll be able to see how closely they suit one position over another, and even their strengths, habits, and natural tendencies as a worker, and use these pieces of information to get to know their preferences and potential as an employee to judge how well they suit what you’re seeking.

3. Make them glad they came, even if you didn’t offer them the job!

It seems that after a while, rejections get easier to write and say in phone calls or video chats, but of course, there will always be some that leave a bit of a mark.

Whether they’re out of empathy or out of frustration, these candidates’ responses are unpleasant, but unavoidable nonetheless—after all, we can’t hire everyone who applies to every position.

The best way to let them down easily, and even make them happy for taking the time and energy to meet with you is to offer them something that shows how appreciative you are of them. And what better way to say how much you value an applicant for their time and efforts interviewing with you (sometimes multiple times!) than to offer them a priceless tool that will help them get a foot in the proverbial door elsewhere?

For one, Packfinder itself is an assessment with a value of over $100 each, and is instead offered to both the candidate and you as the recruiter/employer for free. This assessment—while first-hand meant for your consideration to match with your pre-established benchmark based on soft skills in your previous or current top performing employees—can also provide the applicant with the information about themselves to showcase their future employer that they truly are meant for a position.

As well, they can use the information gained in their Packfinder results to start looking in career paths they otherwise would have never considered, or even simply discover strengths they didn’t realize they had in them!

So, even if a candidate is rejected on their second or third interview, they will still recognize your gratitude for their time and efforts, and they may even apply again for another position in the future—one that they know they have great potential in!

To offer your job applicants Workwolf’s complementary Packfinder assessment, sign up for a free business account here.