How to Conduct an Interview When You're the One Doing the Hiring

That's not a knock on anyone. Interviewing is a skill nobody teaches you until you suddenly need it. And when you're building a company, you need it fast, usually before you feel ready. The good part is that the gap between a bad interview and a decent one isn't talent or charisma. It's structure. A little preparation and a repeatable process will beat gut instinct almost every time.

So this is a practical walk-through of how to run an interview from the hiring side — what to do before, during, and after, and where the usual mistakes hide.

What a Good Interview Process Actually Looks Like

An interview isn't a conversation. It feels like one, which is exactly the trap. A conversation wanders wherever the two people find it interesting, and that's lovely for a coffee catch-up and useless for comparing five candidates for the same role.

A real interview process is closer to a controlled experiment. You're asking similar things of each person so the differences you notice are about them, not about which day you were in a good mood, or which candidate happened to share your taste in music. When people talk about a structured interview process, that's the whole idea — same core questions, same rough criteria, decisions you can defend later.

The payoff is twofold. You get candidates you can actually line up side by side, and you cut the quiet bias that creeps in when everything is done on feel. You'll never remove bias entirely, but structure is the cheapest, most reliable way to blunt it — and it costs you nothing but a bit of planning up front.

Before the Interview: Preparation

Almost everything that separates a good interview from a forgettable one happens before the candidate ever shows up. By our count, the interview itself is maybe twenty percent of the work.

Start with the plainest question: what are you actually hiring for? Not the job title — the two or three things this person actually has to be able to do. Write them down. If you can't name them, no set of clever questions will save you, because you won't know a good answer when you hear one.

Reviewing the resume

Read it properly, once, before the call — not while the candidate is watching you scroll. You're looking for two things: what to dig into, and what doesn't add up. A twelve-month gap, a jump from one field to another, a project that sounds too big for the role they had. None of these are red flags on their own — they're just the interesting parts, where the real story lives. Mark them so you're not improvising in the room.

Setting your questions

Decide your questions ahead of time and decide what a strong answer sounds like for each one. This second part is what people skip. It's easy to write "tell me about a hard project"; it's harder, and far more useful, to know in advance what you're hoping to hear back. Are you listening for how they handled conflict? Whether they can explain a technical decision to a non-technical person? Write the criterion next to the question.

Building a balanced set of questions is more work than it looks — you want an easy opener, something technical, something behavioral, and you don't want to accidentally ask the same thing five different ways. This is one spot where we lean on tooling. VideoApply is a platform we built for one-way video interviews: you post a role, share a link, and candidates record their answers on their own time. And inside it the AI drafts a question set along a deliberate arc: an opener, then technical, then behavioral, then a deeper follow-up — and keeps the mix balanced so you're not left with a lopsided list. You edit it to taste. It's a starting point, not a verdict, and it saves you the blank-page problem.

How to Conduct an Interview, Step by Step

Here's the core of it. You've prepared, the candidate is in front of you (or on the screen), and now you actually have to run the thing. This is the part most guides on how to conduct an interview rush past, so we'll slow down.

Opening and setting the tone

The first two minutes set everything. A nervous candidate gives worse answers, and nervous has nothing to do with competence — it's just adrenaline. So spend a moment being a human: tell them roughly how long you'll take and what you'll cover, and ask something easy to start. You're not being soft; you're removing the static so you can hear the signal underneath.

Asking questions that actually reveal something

The best questions make people describe what they did, not what they believe. "How do you handle pressure?" gets you a rehearsed sentence everyone has ready. "Tell me about the last time a project went sideways — what did you do that week?" gets you a real story with detail you can probe. Past behavior, told concretely, is about the most honest signal you'll get in a room.

Avoid the questions that only sound smart. Brain-teasers, trick puzzles, the classic "what animal would you be" — they mostly measure how comfortable someone is performing on the spot, which is rarely the job.

Listening and following up (what makes a good interviewer)

This is where being a good interviewer gets tested, and it's quieter than people expect. Most of the job is shutting up. The instinct, especially when you're nervous too, is to fill silence, to finish the candidate's thought, to jump to the next question on your list. Don't. Ask your question, then let the pause sit. People fill silence with the truer, less-scripted version of their answer.

Follow-ups are where the real information lives. When someone says "we improved the process," the interview only starts to matter when you ask which process, what was broken, and how they knew it worked. Anyone can claim a result. The follow-up is how you find out whether they did the thing or just stood near it.

Taking notes you can compare later

Write things down during, or immediately after — not tonight, not tomorrow. Memory rewrites itself fast, and by the third candidate they blur together. Jot what they actually said against the criteria you set, not your overall vibe. "Vibe" is where bias hides. If you can point to a specific answer that met a specific bar, you've got something you can compare and defend. If all you have is "I liked her," you've got a feeling, and feelings don't survive a side-by-side with four other people.

Common Interview Techniques (and When They Backfire)

There's a small menu of interview techniques worth knowing, and each has a failure mode.

The biggest fork is structured versus unstructured. Unstructured is the free-flowing chat — it feels natural and predicts almost nothing, because you end up rating rapport instead of ability. Structured means the same planned questions and criteria for everyone, and it consistently does better at telling you who can do the work. You don't have to be robotic about it; you just need a spine.

Behavioral and situational questions are the other staple. Behavioral asks what someone actually did ("tell me about a time…"); situational asks what they'd do in a hypothetical. Behavioral is usually the stronger of the two, since real past action beats an imagined one — but situational earns its place when you're hiring for something the person hasn't faced yet. (We'll go deeper on behavioral questions in a separate piece.)

The technique that backfires most is the one nobody lists as a technique: hiring for "culture fit" on instinct. In practice "fit" often just means "reminds me of me," and that's a fast road to a team that all thinks alike. If culture matters — and it does — define what you actually mean (how they handle disagreement, how they work with others). Ask about that directly, instead of trusting a gut feeling at the door.

After the Interview: Evaluating Fairly

The interview's over, and here's where good process quietly saves you. The temptation is to rank people by how the room felt. Resist it. Go back to the criteria you wrote before, and score each candidate against those, not against each other's charm.

A simple grade against each criterion — even a rough one-to-five — forces you to separate "I enjoyed talking to them" from "they can do the job," and those overlap less than you'd think. If you recorded or wrote down what was actually said, this is where it pays off: you revisit the answer instead of the impression. Our own guide on how to objectively analyze interviews goes further into keeping that evaluation honest and consistent.

This is also where the "let AI grade it" pitch shows up, and it deserves a clear head. Used badly, a black box that watches someone's face and hands you a verdict is worse than your own biased gut, because at least you know your gut is biased. Used well, the tooling does something narrower and more useful: it sets transparent criteria for each question and gives you a recommendation, and a person still makes the call. 

That's the line VideoApply draws — it scores from the transcript of what a candidate said, not their face or voice or tone. The criteria are visible to you, and candidates agree to it up front. Everything is built to comply with GDPR — the EU's data-protection law that sets the rules for handling people's personal information — so the recording, the transcript, and the scoring are all handled above board, with the candidate's consent and clear limits on how long anything is kept. AI helps; the human decides. That distinction is the whole thing.

When Part of the Interview Doesn't Happen Live

Not every interview has to happen in real time, and for the early rounds it increasingly doesn't. When you're screening ten or twenty people for one opening, live scheduling becomes the bottleneck — the back-and-forth over calendars costs you more than the interviews themselves.

The asynchronous version is simple: you set the questions, the candidate records video answers on their own time, and you watch them back when it suits you. No shared calendar slot, no login to fumble through — they open a link and record, with unlimited retakes so a barking dog or a fluffed first line doesn't sink the answer. You review the whole batch on one unhurried evening instead of spreading five calls across a week. (If you're weighing this against a quick phone screen, our take on phone versus video screening lays out the trade-offs.)

Be honest about what you give up, though. There's no live back-and-forth, no chance to follow a surprising answer down the rabbit hole in the moment. So this works for the early screen, not the final round. Use it to get from twenty candidates to a shortlist of four — then meet those four live, where the real conversation belongs.

VideoApply is one tool built for exactly this early async step.

A good interview, in the end, is maybe twenty percent the questions and eighty percent the preparation and the attention you bring to the answers. Get those two right and the rest mostly takes care of itself.

Ready to run your first async screen without the calendar chaos? Try it free at videoapply.io.