Before conducting your interviews, read the following important points on listening, probing, and note taking. Keeping this information in mind will increase the effectivenessof your interviews.

What Every Interviewer Should Know About Listening

Every interviewer needs listening skills. Although this may seem obvious, listening is not always as easy as it sounds. We tend to want to fill in pauses or offer explanations when we should be listening.

Passive Listening

Passive listening includes a wide range of subtle but powerful behaviors that communicate you are paying attention to the speaker. Most people are familiar with simple

behaviors that indicate genuine interest in what someone else is saying. When doing interviews, the key is to remain comfortable enough to do what comes naturally. Here are some tips:

• Sit around a corner from the interviewee. Sitting at an angle is less formal than sitting across a table. Sitting next to the person puts you in an awkward position for watching their expressions. Use good posture; do not slouch or slump. Sit so that you can see both the interviewee and the note takers without having to move your head.
• Use simple verbal or nonverbal cues as encouragement. Showing you are still engaged with the conversation by leaning forward slightly, nodding, or murmuring “uh-huhs” encourages people to keep talking.
• Do not fill every silence. Although some people seem to have little trouble putting their thoughts into words, others take longer to formulate what they want to say. If the person is speaking at length on a relevant topic, do not interrupt. If you sense the interviewee is formulating an answer, do not jump to fill the silence.

Active Listening

Whereas a passive listening encourages a person to keep talking, without signaling any reaction or assessment, an active listener enters the conversation by reflecting his or

her understanding of what has just been communicated. Most often, this reflection is done in the form of a paraphrase: “You sound frustrated by the lack of commitment.”

Some people believe active listening helps them get more out of an interview. Those who prefer only passive listening believe it best to elicit and capture the interviewee’s view of the world without the potential of introducing bias.

The following table lists some of the pros and cons of using active listening during interviews.

What Every Interviewer Should Know About Probing

Collecting language data is challenging because the kinds of information you need to shape your decisions --- specific, concrete facts and experiences – are generally not what people give you at first. Instead, human conversation is typically a mix of opinions, emotion, abstract statements, and conclusions. Consider this example:

An organization trying to adopt a new management philosophy interviewed employees to discover what the problems were. One employee spoke his mind freely: “It’s obvious management doesn’t believe in this change.” The interviewer asked for more detail. “They didn’t even begin training until six months after they announced the change."

Now suppose you were working on a team that was formulating recommendations for how to make a smooth transition to new methods. This employee’s first statement does little to help you understand what the current barriers are and what could be done. The second statement provides more useful information: that a perceived delay in implementation was interpreted as lack of commitment.

As an interviewer, you will hear many abstract or emotionally charged words such as “obvious,” "great,” “lousy,” “hard,” and “easy,” as well as lots of conclusions, like “management doesn’t believe in the change.” The key is to move speakers beyond their initial words to a more specific, concrete level.

Build your skills at moving down the ladder of abstraction by learning to probe for details, when appropriate.

The following table provides guidelines for probing.