Making the decision

Throughout the interviews all interviewers should complete an interview assessment form for each candidate. This will allow you to rank candidate responses against the essential criteria. You must not make any selection decisions until all the interviews have taken place.

Identify the appointable candidates

The interviewers should come together and compare their assessments, as well as the results of any tests, presentations or references. The recruiting manager should use the summary interview assessment form to detail the interviewer's discussion of each candidate, in line with the selection criteria. Based on this objective discussion the interviewers will decide which candidates are appointable and which are not and record the decisions on the form.

Identify your first choice

You should then rank the list of appointable candidates based upon how well they meet the criteria in the job description and person specification. Each interviewer should compile the ranking independently to make the process as fair as possible.

This approach will hopefully lead to a unanimous decision, but if it doesn't the chair of the panel should lead further discussions until a consensus is reached. If a consensus cannot be reached then the chair should make the final decision.