Foreign companies expanding into Türkiye face a critical challenge: hiring managers who can navigate both your corporate culture and Türkiye’s unique business ecosystem. A well-planned job interview is one of the most powerful tools for identifying talent, strengthening employer branding, and ensuring long-term hiring success.
In Türkiye’s competitive talent market, where businesses across Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, and other major cities are vying for top professionals, mastering the interview process can make the difference between placing exceptional candidates and settling for mediocre ones.
As recruitment professionals, we know that an interview must be more than a conversation—it should be a strategically designed evaluation method that produces fair, accurate, and repeatable results. A well-structured interview ensures consistency, reduces bias, and provides comparable data across candidates.
Below is a comprehensive guide employers can use to design, structure, and conduct interviews that lead to better hiring decisions. Whether you’re setting up your first Turkish office or scaling existing operations, these interview strategies will help you identify candidates who possess both technical competence and the business acumen essential for success.
Start by developing or validating the job description. Make sure the following are well-defined:
A clear role definition ensures the interview remains focused on what truly matters for success. Create a detailed job description that reflects actual responsibilities, not just a wish list.
Before the interview, review:
This allows the interviewer to ask informed, relevant, and personalised questions.
Structured interviews outperform unstructured ones in both predictive power and fairness. Create:
This approach reduces bias and ensures every candidate is assessed equally.
Developing these frameworks requires significant expertise. FMC Group’s recruitment specialists create customized interview scorecards for each position, ensuring foreign employers evaluate Turkish candidates against locally-relevant competency benchmarks.
Involve key decision-makers who understand the role and company culture. Sharing the names and roles of the participants with the candidate before the interview will be a polite reminder that you value them. All participants should be informed of the estimated interview duration in advance.
A typical effective interview includes:
Set a professional yet welcoming tone. Introduce yourself, outline the interview steps, and give a brief overview of the company and the role.
Invite the candidate to summarise their experience. This helps them settle and allows you to confirm core qualifications. Make sure you understand what company and position the candidate worked for and for how long, their position within the company organization, their success in each role, and why they left the company.
Use behavioral questions to understand past experiences related to teamwork, leadership, and conflict resolution. Behavioural questions provide real evidence of past performance and predict future behaviour. Follow the STAR framework and listen for complete responses covering Situation, Task, Action, and Result. If candidates provide vague or incomplete answers, probe deeper with follow-up questions.
Our experience placing sales managers and BDMs for our international clients across Türkiye shows that the most predictive questions focus on reliability, communication and openness to direct feedback, because they should be able to be a good bridge between the overseas headquarters and the local market.
These questions measure whether the candidate meets the functional requirements of the position. Include scenario-based questions to evaluate problem-solving and decision-making.
Allow time for candidates to demonstrate interest and evaluate the opportunity. Answer their questions honestly; overselling a role leads to poor retention. Explain the timeline, next steps and how communication will proceed. Thank the candidate for their time.
Make notes immediately after the interview. Document your observations while fresh, rating the candidate on each competency using your scorecard.
“Give an example of a situation where your idea or action has been opposed by a group, your manager or customer, but you could c convince them? How do you think that you could convince them?”
“Describe a situation where you received critical feedback. How did you respond, and what changes did you make?”
“Describe a situation where you had to lead a team through a difficult period or significant change. What was your approach?”
Mastering the interview process requires preparation, structure, and practice. The most successful recruitment agencies in Türkiye consistently apply proven frameworks while adapting to each unique situation and candidate.
Many companies in Türkiye partner with recruitment agencies to ensure structured interviews, competency-based evaluations, and more objective hiring decisions.
Recruitment agencies bring:
Working with a dedicated recruitment partner like Recruitment in Turkey – FMC Group often leads to better cultural alignment and long-term employee retention.
A well-designed interview process strengthens both hiring quality and employer reputation. By preparing thoroughly, asking the right questions, and evaluating candidates objectively, organisations can consistently identify talent that contributes to long-term success.
By implementing the structured approach outlined in this guide, using behavioral questions that reveal true competencies, and avoiding common pitfalls, you’ll dramatically improve your ability to identify candidates who will thrive in their roles.
Remember: every interview is an opportunity to build your reputation. Whether candidates receive offers or not, they should leave feeling respected, fairly evaluated, and impressed by your professionalism. In Türkiye’s interconnected business community, today’s candidate could be tomorrow’s client or referral source.
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