Why do first impressions mislead you in interviews?
Everything you notice immediately, how nervous someone is, how they dress, whether they went to the same school as your mate, is above the surface. None of those things are correlated with job performance. Yet they are almost always what drives the hiring decision.
What actually predicts performance sits below the surface: the ability to solve problems, handle pressure and ambiguous situations, communicate in real life, take accountability, and work well with clients and teammates. Your job in an interview is to get underneath to that layer.
How do you open the interview to get the candidate talking?
Start with "tell me a little bit about yourself." There is no right or wrong answer to this. The only purpose is to put the candidate at ease and get them comfortable having a conversation with you.
Then frame the interview for them. Tell them you will start by getting to know them, then move into targeted questions related to the job, and then hand over to them to ask you anything they want. What they ask you at the end is telling: questions about money, flexibility, career development, or your growth plans each reveal what matters to them.
How do you assess whether a candidate can actually do the job?
Get specific about their experience. If your business does domestic maintenance, ask directly about their experience with domestic versus commercial work. If you work with volume builders, ask what that experience looks like for them. The closer their past examples are to your actual work, the better you can assess fit.
Once you have covered technical skills and experience, shift to mindset and behaviour. This is where the "tell me about a time when" question is your most important tool.
Why use 'tell me about a time when' instead of hypothetical questions?
Hypothetical questions, framed as "if this happened to you, what would you do", let candidates give you a textbook answer. They can describe exactly what a good employee would do without ever having done it.
When you ask "tell me about a time when this happened", people go into storytelling mode. In their story, you find out how they actually operate. Greg gives a direct example from his own interviewing experience: asking candidates to tell him about a time things did not go to plan, and repeatedly finding that candidates use the answer to blame every teammate around them. That tells you they are not a team player. A hypothetical question would never surface that.
If the situation has never happened to them, it becomes obvious quickly. If it has, you get the real version.
What is the STAR method and how do you use it?
STAR is a structure for getting the full story out of a behavioural question. It covers the Situation, the Task, the Action, and the Result.
For a trade context it works like this:
- Situation: Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a client.
- Task: What were you trying to achieve?
- Action: What did you actually do?
- Result: What happened in the end?
You are not just after the story. You want to know the outcome. Did the client sign off? Did they escalate? The result tells you as much as the behaviour does.
How do you use a scoring system to reduce bias?
Take the criteria you already put in your job ad and put them into a simple document with each candidate in a column. Score every candidate on every criterion using a one-to-five scale as you go through the interview, not afterwards.
One means a significant gap between what the job needs and where they are. Five means they far exceed the expectation. Ask the same questions in the same order to every candidate. This removes the common biases that wreck hiring decisions:
- Affinity bias: favouring someone because they have the same background or interests as you.
- Confirmation bias: deciding early whether you like someone and then spending the rest of the interview looking for proof.
- Halo effect: letting one strong attribute, such as holding a useful trade ticket, blind you to everything else about the person.
- Horn effect: letting one small negative detail colour your view of the candidate entirely.
Scoring based on job criteria rather than personal connection means you are evaluating their answers, not their personality. It gives you a defensible, comparable result across every person you interview.
