When you are hiring a new employee you naturally want the best person for the role. In a candidate poor job market you need to realize that while you are interviewing the candidate, they are also interviewing you to see if they really want to work for you. You need to be on your game - to make sure you leave candidates with a great impression of your company.

So, let’s start with the basics. Interviews are not an exact science. They are not meant to be. The best you can do is to try and remove as much of the emotion of the process as possible and balance it with logic.

Interviews should be about helping candidates show their best side, it is not about tricking them, putting them under added stress and seeing how they “perform”. They are not seals; they are human beings complete with human feelings. Interviews are of themselves inherently stressful - so even in the most relaxed interview you are getting a person operating under stress.

Here are some tips to help you with your job interviews

Before the interview:

1) Make time in your diary for the interview. You need to show candidates the courtesy of being fully “present” at the interview. If you need to, hire additional staff to cover for you or close the shop for an hour.

2) Make sure there will be no interruptions. If you allow yourself to be interrupted during the interview you are giving candidates the message that when they work for you they are unimportant and will always be second best. Is that the message you really want to give?

3) Work out exactly what you are looking for. Of course you have a position description for the role written. If you don’t, you need to write one before the interviews so that candidates know exactly what the role will entail. Once you know precisely what they will be doing, work out what skills and experience are essential in order to be able to perform the role.

4) Work out the sort of person you need for your team. Fitting a person into a team is a real jigsaw. If you are a scattered sort of person, perhaps you need to look for someone organized to balance your gaps. It is easy to get carried away with someone who is a nice person, but if they don’t have the skills or the right personality for the team then they are the wrong person for this role.

5) Make sure you are not directly or indirectly discriminating. Do you really need a “bloke” for the role if it involves heavy work? Gender is not a good predictor of strength. Some of the weediest people I have met have been blokes and the strongest people who can bench-press better than everyone in the gym are women.

6) Contact the candidates. Let them know who will be interviewing them, how long they can expect the interview to last, where to come and where they can park. By showing them courtesy as if they are your top client, you are sending a very strong message about what it will be like to work with you.

7) Somewhere to wait. Make sure there is somewhere nice to wait before the interview. Some candidates can arrive up to half an hour early, so be prepared.