This is part 3 of a series on interviewing.  Check here for part 1 on setting up an interviewing team.

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It’s important that every candidate be treated like you’d treat a VIP customer.  Even if you don’t wind up making an offer, they will have a deeper interaction with your company and your staff than the vast majority of the general public, and you want them to go away wishing they’d gotten an offer.  They are going to tell people about their experience with your company, and you want the story they tell to be about how awesome a place it seems to be, rather than how they dodged a bullet by not getting an offer!

There are a long set of interactions which happen prior to a candidate coming in for an interview loop which I’ll talk about in other posts.  Here, I want to focus on the in-house interview.  For that, he first step of that is to make sure the candidate has a full  schedule of their visit.  This should be delivered to them along with all the initial travel arrangements.  Ideally, it should include:

• an initial meet & greet / tour segment
• a list of each person they’re going to meet along with their role and email
• a schedule of when important events are happening throughout the day (e.g., each interview, lunch, happy hour, etc.)

The first part, the meet & greet, serves two important purposes.  First, it’s important to always bear in mind that most people find interviews extremely nerve-wracking.  A short tour of the office, and a chance to chit-chat with a few people helps the candidate unwind a bit.  Second, it gives you a time buffer to absorb any unexpected delays in the candidate’s travels.  Whether it’s traffic, parking, a flat tire, a late subway train… whatever.  It’s easy enough to just cut this period a bit short so the candidate can get started on time, and you can avoid messing up the rest of the day’s schedule.

The second point, giving a list of interviewers, deserves a bit more explanation.  For a mediocre candidate, this information won’t matter.  However, for an exceptional candidate, it’s an opportunity for them to show their enthusiasm and their diligence.  Really exceptional candidates will do some homework on their interviewers, and will often have some interesting question, anecdote, or topic to discuss with each interviewer.  Such candidates will also generally avail themselves of the opportunity to individually follow up with each interviewer to thank them for their time.

Finally, providing a schedule allows the candidate to mentally (and perhaps physically) prepare themselves for the expected duration and expectations for the full day.  I’ve had a number of candidates comment to me over the years at how unexpectedly rigorous / lengthy an interview was.  I’ve also had experiences as a candidate where I wasn’t able to make some other commitment because the full extent of my time commitment wasn’t clear.

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At the end of the day, you want your candidate to walk away thinking well of your company, the people they met, and how they were treated as a guest at your office.  One of the easiest things you can do to ensure that happens is to avoid surprising them, and by giving them a chance to do their homework up front.  And, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by your best candidates when they actually do.