How to Conduct a Peer Interview to Find the Right Candidate
Cultural fit is an important factor in finding the right candidate for a job.
According to recruitment consultancy Robert Walters, candidates who mesh well with the teams they’re placed on are 84% better at meeting performance goals and 81% less likely to leave. These are real, tangible reasons to ensure your hires are a good fit for your company culture.
At companies like Google and Netflix, peer interviews play an important role in achieving this. They get potential employees to interact with candidates and give hiring managers a more accurate read of their personalities.
But unfortunately, only 52% of candidates meet their future peers before being hired.
So, in this Willo guide, we show you how to flip the script and prioritize peer interviews to find the best fit for your team.
What Is a Peer Interview Interview?
A peer interview is a process where candidates are interviewed by potential future colleagues, rather than just managers, recruiters, and HR professionals.
When do peer interviews happen?
Typically, they happen towards the end of the hiring cycle once you’ve narrowed down the applicant pool and are almost ready to make a decision. The goal is to get an idea of how well candidates will fit in with the team and whether they’re a good fit for your culture.
Why Opt for Peer Interviews?
Better aligned assessment
Hiring managers and recruiters likely don’t have a perfect understanding of what new hires will face on the job. Co-workers and colleagues are able to ask questions that are more relevant and tailored to the actual day-to-day practicalities of the role.
Diverse perspectives
Getting multiple team members involved in interviews means you get a mix of viewpoints, making your candidate evaluation more balanced. Peer interviews also help limit the impact of individual biases by distributing the decision to more people.
Enhanced team buy-in
When team members have a say in who gets hired, they feel more invested and engaged. This investment can make them more enthusiastic about helping the new hire settle in and succeed, more proactive about supporting training and onboarding, and more likely to build a strong working relationship with the new team member.
Better company selling
Peer interviews are a two-way street. Candidates get to ask current employees about the company, which gives your team a chance to speak highly of your workplace. This will definitely boost the candidate's enthusiasm and interest in joining your team.
How to Conduct a Peer Interview
1. Define your expectations
The first step in conducting a peer interview is to figure out what you want to achieve with the interview.
Are you focusing on soft skills, or do you need a more technical assessment? Do you want structured feedback from the interviewer, or general impressions? Your goal here will shape your approach to peer interviews—from picking interviews to designing questions—so think carefully.
2. Assemble a peer interview panel
To conduct peer interviews effectively, you need to choose the right employees to champion the process.
First, how many people do you need? Ideally, aim for two or three employees per peer interview for a specific role. If you’re interviewing a lot of candidates, spread the task around among willing team members, making sure it doesn’t disrupt their usual work.
Here’s what to look for in potential peer interviewers:
- Relevance of roles: This is very important. Pick interviewers whose roles match up with the position the candidate is applying for. This allows them to empathize, ask better questions, make more accurate assessments, and spot potential red flags.
- Cultural fit: Choose interviewers who really embody your company's culture. To avoid feelings of favoritism, use objective criteria to define cultural alignment and make these criteria known. Also, make sure you rotate through qualified interviewers, and give preference to people who volunteer for the task.
- Diversity: It’s smart to include people from various backgrounds on your panel. This can mean diversity in professional experience, educational backgrounds, work styles, problem-solving approaches, and demographics like age, gender, and ethnicity. Making this a priority helps reduce bias and bring in different perspectives—both of which are crucial for promoting diversity and inclusion in recruiting.
- Availability and willingness: Make sure the chosen team members are both available and eager to take part in the interviews. If the interviewer isn’t engaged, it has the potential to scare off talented candidates. It can also affect the quality of their assessments.
3. Train the interviewers
Many of your team members might be conducting an interview for the first time. So, it’s important to give them the right training before handing over the reins. There are tons of things to train interviewers on, but here are just a few important ones.
Start by covering common recruitment pitfalls, like adverse impact and bias. Let them know they're not looking for a “mini-me,” so personal preferences should be set aside.
You should also teach essential interview techniques, such as asking open-ended questions, listening actively, and avoiding leading questions. If you’re using any interview software, give them a quick demo of how it works.
Last but not least—ensure they’re familiar with the candidate's requirements and expectations. This isn’t a one-time discussion—it’s something to revisit for every role and hiring season to keep everyone on the same page. At the very least, each peer should review the job description before starting the interview process.
4. Develop interview questions
Now that you have well-trained interviewers who understand the interview’s objectives, work with them to develop your interview questions based on these goals.
Start by listing your expectations and the criteria for measuring them. Then, create questions that match these criteria. For example, your expectation might be that the candidate has strong communication and interpersonal skills. Your granular criteria could be:
- Communicates effectively both verbally and in writing.
- Is a good listener
- Can build rapport with others
- Can handle difficult conversations
So, examples of questions to gauge these criteria would be:
- "Describe a time when you had to communicate a complex message to a colleague or client. How did you approach the conversation?"
- Tell me about a time when you had to give feedback to a coworker. How did you provide feedback and what was the outcome?
Remember, peer interviewing is a two-way street. Candidates will likely have their own questions and will want to hear from your team, too. So, include a section in the interview where they can ask their own questions. It could be as simple as, “Do you have any questions for us?”
5. Set up the interview
Next, it’s time to choose how you’ll conduct the interviews. You generally have two options:
- Synchronous Interviews: These happen in real-time, where your interviewers and the candidate meet either in person or via video call.
- Asynchronous Interviews: Candidates record their answers to pre-set questions, which your interviewers can review whenever it suits them.
However, we typically recommend asynchronous interviews.
While many people love meeting candidates, interviews are time-consuming and potentially disruptive to their main responsibilities. Plus, coordinating schedules between multiple employees and candidates presents a big logistical challenge, especially for companies hiring at scale or across different time zones.
Using an async interview tool like Willo is a solution that lets you save time and interview candidates at scale. For example, Packaly’s hiring team used Willo to save 60 hours as they tripled their workforce without impacting the quality of their hires.
Source: How Willo Helped Packaly do the Work of 4 Full-Time Recruiters
Here’s how it works:
- Create your interview: First, plug your questions into Willo to set up the interview. You can choose to receive responses in various formats—video, text, audio, etc.
- Send the link: Send the interview link to candidates via email. We integrate with your preferred ATS to let you do this at scale. Plus, feel free to add a note letting them know that their future colleagues will be reviewing their responses.
- Candidates submit their responses: Candidates can complete the interview at their own pace. And if they have any questions, they can leave them in the final section of the interview, answering the last question we talked about earlier.
Once the responses start coming in, use Willo's Showcase feature to invite the relevant team members to review them. You can also create Scorecards based on the criteria you set earlier, allowing your interviewers to rate each response from strong yes to strong no.
Source: Scorecards
In the end, simply compare the scorecards of different candidates to see how they stack up.
6. Respond to candidate questions.
Finally, you need a system in place to handle the questions candidates might ask. This is a great chance to showcase your company and sell it to them.
Willo can help with this, too. You can collect the questions candidates ask and have your employees record brief answers at their convenience using Willo. Then…
- Compile these videos into one big video,
- Host it on a platform like Vimeo,
- Share the link with your candidates.
This way, everyone who asks questions gets to see their answers and get a better sense of your company.
Conduct Effective Peer Interviews With Willo
Peer interviews come with all kinds of great benefits—think better team buy-in, more aligned interviews, and diverse perspectives. But to get the most out of them, you need to implement them correctly. This guide lays out a solid process to help you do just that.
If you're looking for a time-saving, scalable way to conduct peer interviews, async interviews are the way to go—and Willo is your best bet. We’ve helped talented recruiting teams at companies like Packaly, MyTutor, and WillowTree achieve amazing results—and we want to help you, too.
Want to learn more about what Willo can do? Sign up for a free trial today and see the difference for yourself.
