How long should a job interview be?

To make sure that a meeting with a job candidate goes smoothly, businesses should try and put checks into place that will help to streamline the process and keep a regular flow of people entering the office. One way to make interviews easier to run and less stressful is to make sure they happen on a schedule, or at least set one up at the beginning.

Obviously, there’s no telling whether or not a time table will be followed to the letter. Late-arriving candidates, among other potential mishaps, can easily throw the established schedule off-course.

An interview could also naturally run longer or shorter based on the way the applicant conducts him or herself. The key is to think of everything you will need to accomplish during the interview and leave enough time to get this done. In terms of a computer skills assessment, this means having a test ready that lasts a certain amount of time and accounting for it accordingly.

One way to keep it on as close a schedule as possible is to limit the amount of people that need to be present for an interview. A piece for Harvard Business Review recently advised, among other things, that the hiring process only contain some “checks,” perhaps two senior members of the company and an HR person, as one member of an executive search firm suggests.

HR staff that are looking for regular and reliable results from the hiring process need a standardized pre employment testing option for a consistent way to judge whether a person is fit for the open role or not. Working closely with these tests will help businesses decide how much time to allot in the hiring process and thus create an effective overall template.