Every school board wants to ensure that it has the best teachers available for its students each year. The interviewing process is an opportunity to search for teachers who will be beneficial in their schools and classrooms. There are different techniques to interviewing that allow in-depth questions and observation to help interviewers identify the best candidate for the position.

Panel Interview
Ask a few members of your faculty to assist in an interview for a teaching position. Prior to the interview, discuss the qualifications you are looking for and any action or answer that would disqualify a candidate. Also, have the panel brainstorm questions. Select the most important questions for the interview. Provide a handout for the interview with the questions. During the interview, each person can take a turn asking questions. You can assign questions ahead of time or start with one person asking the first question and continue down the panel until all questions have been asked. The panel should take notes during the interview. After the interview, the panel can discuss the candidates and rank them for the position.

Screening Interviews
For a screening interview process, each interviewer is assigned certain questions, characteristics and red flags to look for. The first interview can be with a teacher or perhaps two who are very familiar with the school dynamics. If the teacher believes the candidate is a good fit for the position, then the candidate moves on to a second interview with a senior member of staff, such as the assistant principal. Again, the assistant principal will decide who he believes should move on. For the final interview, you can have everyone present or just the principal. The principal can ask a school board member or someone from the school district's human resources department to be present during the interview. It is important during the screening process to keep up with all notes taken during the interview. Each interviewer should be provided with materials such as questions and a rubric to rank the candidates. When the final interviews are done, all of the interviewers can share their thoughts on the candidates.

Behavior-Based Interviewing
Behavior-based interviewing (BBI) is a technique that began in the world of business. Now it is being used to guide schools toward qualified teachers during the interviewing process. The idea behind BBI is that a teacher's past behavior will predict her future behavior. To use this technique in an interview, the candidate is asked about her experiences as they relate to classroom management, behavioral issues and lesson planning. Specific incidences should be given and not generic answers to best understand past behavior. You want the candidate to present an issue, the choices she made and the result.

Group Interview
A group interview is an opportunity to get more than one candidate in a room at one time. There should be three or four faculty members present during the interview. The candidates can be given a small task either related to teaching or even a team-building exercise that will force them to work together. The interview can also be presented in a way similar to the panel interview but with each member of the panel asking a question and each candidate getting a chance to answer. The groups can be three people or more.