Effectively interviewing and recruiting candidates with optimal talent is essential to any organisation’s global capability, strategic planning and direct and indirect costs. As employment continues to rise and the number of job applicants multiplies at an enhanced rate, organisations hiring new employees are faced with an increasingly large pool of cross-cultural candidates from around the world.

Conducting effective interviews of candidates from your own country is not always as simple as it may seem. Interviewing candidates from another culture is even more challenging as the number of things that need to be considered and correctly evaluated increases significantly.

When interviewing someone from another culture it is important to remember that your own cultural values and expectations can have a huge influence on how you interpret that person’s skills and experience. There are many stories of cross-cultural interviews where the opportunity to hire an excellent candidate was missed due to misinterpretation or misunderstanding of cultural differences.

To avoid missing a great candidate, you must be aware of how both verbal and non-verbal communication can vary dramatically from one culture to another. Cross-cultural training can increase your understanding and awareness of the following cultural variables that affect cross-cultural job interviews:

• Eye contact
• Tone of voice
• Facial expressions
• Gestures
• Greetings
• Pauses and silence
• Context
• Hierarchy

Examples of failing to correctly interpret cross-cultural values and behaviours can be both simple and complex. For example, many candidates from countries where respect for hierarchy is high such as China or Vietnam will avoid making direct eye contact with the interviewer. In a country like the UK or US, eye contact is really important and serves to not only build trust but create confidence in the candidate’s abilities and skills. Candidates from China and Vietnam are therefore often considered shy and lacking self-assurance.

A more complex example revolves around how candidates deal with context. A candidate from a low context culture such as Germany or the US will provide a lot more detail when asked a question than someone from a high context culture who might give a much shorter and indirect answer. This can often be interpreted as either talking too much or not having enough experience when it’s really more of a question of communication style preference.

Understanding these and other cross-cultural variables and the impact they have on your evaluation of a candidate’s skills, experience and personality is fundamental to successful recruitment. Cross-cultural training programmes for Human Resources such as Conducting Cross-Cultural Interviews can help ensure you avoid making judgements based on cultural stereotypes or erroneous interpretations.

Understanding these differences through cross-cultural training will enable you to overcome the obstacles cultural differences create and help you select the best person for the job.