A key stage in an employee's life, individual interviews are an opportunity for managers to take stock of their teams' skills and career aspirations. However, the preparation and follow-up of these interviews are not always optimized. The result is a loss of information that is crucial to the development of corporate strategy.
In this article, we take a look at the importance of individual interviews, their legal aspects, and our advice on how to prepare for them and ensure the ideal follow-up.
Individual interview, annual interview, professional interview... What are the differences?
In the course of his or her working life, an employee will be confronted with various types of interview. These are key moments, enabling employer and employee to take stock of objectives, career prospects and feelings within the company.
These include individual, annual and professional appraisal interviews. Often used synonymously, they don't actually mean the same thing. And in legal terms, the rules are changing too:
The personal interview (also known as the annual review)
Individual and annual interviews are the same event. This is a meeting between the employee and his or her employer, line manager or a member of human resources. During this meeting, both parties review the employee's activity over a given period. This can be an opportunity to take stock of the objectives previously set, the development of know-how and interpersonal skills, and the employee's commitment. Unlike the professional interview, theannual maintenance is not required by law. However, it is possible that your collective agreement or employer may decide to introduce it. In this case, it applies to all employees.
The professional interview
As we saw earlier, the individual interview focuses on the correlation between the company's objectives and the work performed by the employee. The professional interview focuses solely on the employee's professional development.. This is an opportunity for the employer to take stock of the skills of each employee, and thus anticipate training needs. Article L. 6315-1 of the French Labor Code specifies that the professional interview is mandatory for all companiesregardless of the number of employees. It must be held at least every two years. It should also be noted that the professional interview is mandatory after certain leaves of absence, such as parental leave, sabbatical leave or sick leave of more than 6 months.
Managers: how to manage the pre- and post-interview phases?
To find out more about how individual interviews are prepared in the industrial sector, we conducted a survey among our customers. The result: on average 90 days for follow-up interviews for a full-time employee. In the digital age, where younger generations expect frequent feedback, this seems a relatively long time to wait. Fortunately, with the right organization and the right tools, it's possible to keep track of employees efficiently, while making the most of the data collected.
Rules for preparing a personal interview
Individual interviews are important moments in an employee's life, and should not be taken lightly. They need to be prepared well in advance, so as to have as much context as possible on the big day. We strongly recommend that you take the following items with you:
- Minutes of previous interviews.
- A description of each position.
- The list of objectives defined at department or employee level.
- Results over the past period.
In the same vein, preparing a framework based on existing data helps to focus the dialogue on tangible, measurable elements. For example:
| Individual target | Performance indicators | Terms and conditions | Evaluation |
| Reduce the scrap rate of 10% on its shift over the year. | Scrap rates | > Fill in the forms at the end of each shift > Participate in workshops to propose areas for improvement | A |
The various tools used during individual interviews should help prepare the company for the future. In this way, managers should be able to have a real operational vision for setting new objectives in line with corporate strategy.
Annual blue-collar interviews: follow-up tools
But team follow-up doesn't stop at the individual interview. Effective follow-up takes place over time, to help employees achieve their objectives.
Yet many employers confess to having difficulties in setting up regular follow-upfor lack of suitable tools. Indeed, for many companies, interview management is still mainly done on paper, in Excel or via HRIS systems that are not adapted to the reality of deskless workers, who have neither email address nor computer. These methods don't allow employees to play an active role in their own career development.
At Mercateam, we believe that one-to-one interviews should be part of the same logic as a sales strategy. Talent Management. In fact, regular monitoring of skills and authorizations enables managers to be all the more effective at the time of annual appraisals.
For this reason, at the end of the year we're launching a feature dedicated to individual interviews.
Follow up individual interviews with Mercateam
What if you could automatically track the individual interviews of all your employees, across all production sites? Mercateam replaces your paper files and Excel spreadsheets with an intelligent interface, connected to your other HR data.
What you can do:
- Create annual appraisal templates adapted to each type of employee.
- Keeping pace between objectives defined in year n and objectives achieved in n+1
- Simple access to comparison between what was expected and what was achieved (skills enhancement, know-how, etc.)
- See in real time the interviews to be carried outand completed.
- Launch campaigns on all production siteswith different models to suit different employees.
- Throwing training requests at the time of the interview.
- Go to the skills mapping.
