Interviewing - Panel/Group or Individual?

Interviewing candidates is a skill that not every hiring manager possesses. Too often it seems that the interviewing process forms a life of its own that is out of step with the normal flow of the business unit that is interviewing. What that means for both the hiring manager and the candidate is that the true nature of both the position and the candidate remains an unknown until after the hiring decision. Much can be helped by incorporating the use of group/panel interviews in the process.

For starters, I find it helpful to refer to panel interviews as group interviews because the word "panel" suggests that the team doing to the interviewing will be sitting in a row of chairs behind a long table with the candidate sitting on a chair with no desk, in the middle of the room by themselves. A group interview is more like an interview meeting. The hiring manager pulls together key members of their team to conduct the interview in a conference room or all together in an office. Depending on the team and the hiring manager, this may be only the senior members of the team or it may include the entire team.

The benefits of the group interview are numerous, but the most important benefit to my mind is that the team gets a realistic snapshot of how the candidate will operate within their group based on actual experience. Everyone involved is receiving the same information as opposed to attempting to piece together a whole picture from various input received from questions asked in multiple meetings, phrased differently, etc.

I have found over the years that hiring managers who do group interviews have more success in getting a decision made quickly and have a much higher level of interest from the candidates who interview. In every instance where the candidate was offered a position from two different business units where one did a group interview and the other applied the more traditional interview method of meetings with one person at a time, the candidate chose the business unit that did the group interview. Without exception! The group interview provides the candidate with the same level of information as it does for the interviewing team, and it is simply more information than is possible to gather from individual interviews.

In my opinion, the hiring manager and their selected team members should interview the candidate all together for at least one hour followed immediately by a one-on-one interview with the candidate for 30 minutes or so. Even if the hiring manager is only in the group interview for the first 15-30 minutes, some level of participation is ideal. For a second round, individual interviews with senior level staff from other areas of the business or from the executive level are appropriate.

What is most important is the interaction between the candidate and at least some of the people he/she will be working with if offered the position. The experience for both the team and the candidate is richer and full of more relevant detail than any 10 individual interviews.