HireBest Foundations On Demand

Craig Della Penna introduces the HireBest foundation program, built on the secrets of over 1,000 structured interviews, and sets out what you will be able to do in your very next interview.

How to get the most from the course: keep your workbook to hand, take notes as you go, and answer the quiz questions well to earn a HireBest certification badge for your LinkedIn page.

This lesson identifies three common mistakes that lead to poor hiring decisions.

The quality of an interview depends heavily on what you do beforehand.

Before you interview, get clear on what you're actually looking for.

A job cipher is a one to two page document that brings radical clarity to what matters most in your hiring decision.

You now have the basic components you need to create a cipher before interviewing candidates.

The charge is your elevator pitch for the role - the essence of what you're looking for, in plain language.

The outcome takes your charge and makes it concrete.

The deliverables are what someone must accomplish to achieve the outcome you defined earlier.

Efforts are the specific actions that will achieve each deliverable.

Bias exists in every interview process, often in ways we don't expect.

The best interviews share three hallmarks.

The best interviewers don't obsess over having the perfect questions.

Before diving into questions, make sure you and the person you're interviewing share the same definition of success for the conversation.

This demonstration walks through a complete interview opening, showing how to:

This lesson covers the bad habits that undermine clear thinking and communication.

Why is a word that puts a candidate on the back foot: it reads as judgement mid-interview. Swap it for how come and watch the conversation open up.

Projection means keeping your own discomfort, judgements and baggage out of the interview.

A generalization is a great way to hide the truth. When you hear what someone generally does, ask for a specific time they did - and a time they did not.

Tangents happen when you ask follow-up questions that satisfy your own curiosity rather than serve the interview's purpose.

This lesson covers five legal issues in US recruiting that you must avoid.

This lesson introduces question sleuthing - the approach you take when asking questions, which sits between building rapport and choosing what to ask.

This lesson demonstrates why open-ended questions matter through a simple experiment with drinks.

This lesson covers five techniques for asking questions and conducting interviews:

An unaided question is short and doesn't provide much context or prompting.

People naturally fill silence.

When exploring difficult territory - weaknesses, failures, things that didn't go well - avoid yes/no questions.

The other techniques - open questions, fireworks, short answers, silence - are brilliant for drawing someone out.

When you're interviewing someone who loves to tell long, detailed stories, you can lose control of the time and miss important ground you need to cover.

The five doings describe what you're actually doing during an interview.

Being curious is the foundation of great interviewing.

When you ask a question in an interview, you must get an answer.

Being approachable doesn't mean being a pushover or letting the candidate take control.

This lesson covers advanced interviewing techniques - the practical moves that help you get past surface answers and gather richer, more useful information.

A short workbook exercise: write down the number-one reason you do not interrupt people, before the next lesson picks the answers apart.

Interrupting is rude - it means stopping someone mid-thought for your own purposes.

Comparative performance means looking for places where a candidate performed better or worse - either against themselves at different times, or against other people.

Sometimes an interview just isn't working.

A strong close completes the circle.

The close is where you remember to recruit as well as assess: if you extend an offer, you want it accepted - so the candidate must leave feeling their time was well invested.

This lesson walks through four steps for closing an interview in a way that leaves candidates with a genuinely positive experience - even if they don't get the job.

This lesson covers how to close a sales conversation with genuine gratitude.

This covers how to handle questions from candidates during the interview process.

Let candidates know they can reach out for feedback regardless of the outcome - whether they accept an offer, decline it, or don't receive one.

This lesson covers how to close an interview by setting clear expectations about what happens next.

You've done the interview differently - asked better questions, gathered richer detail - so now you need to process what you've learned differently too.

If you've invested time in a proper interview process, don't skip the debrief.

If you're not going to debrief, why interview at all?

Do your debrief on the same day as the interviews.

Before the debrief conversation begins, every interviewer must submit their assessment independently.

Where the four watchouts come from: the mistakes that good hiring decisions - the clients own and Craig included - would have been saved by.

When you really like a candidate, it's tempting to downplay concerns by telling yourself they're minor: "It's just that they left their last three jobs after nine months" or "It's just that they've never done exactly what we need - but it's close enough."

Lights out is the opposite of bright spot.

Bright spot happens when you fall in love with one thing about a candidate - a perfect piece of experience, a standout achievement - and that single data point starts driving the entire hiring decision.

In your debrief, if the conversation stays at surface level - the prestige of their previous employer, the scale of the projects they were near - but you can't describe what the candidate themselves actually did, that's a problem.

This course has filtered through the jumble of interview advice and common practices to focus on what actually works: a structured process built on a cipher, with clear question-asking techniques and a high-quality debrief to ensure you make the right decisions.