One thing I’ve had help melt the pressure on both sides of the table is a laugh. I’m fortunate enough to be able to sort of slice through tension and get a rise out of most people.
Stressing exactly what you’re looking for, that you’re not perfect either, that there’s no one solution, and letting them know things can be collaborative has been helpful too.
Let’s ping pong off each other and see where we get, I mean that’s what we’d be doing in the day to day right?
To this end I’ve sat down and added new questions to the interview guides at my previous position because I was concerned that any person asking the same question over and over again would really start to be biased towards some sort of “ideal” solution.
But there’s really nothing like a good laugh to put people at ease.
After one interview I mentioned that I felt I did a good job of interviewing because I could usually help relax the tensions which generally gets the best out of people and someone said that they didn’t think they’d ever gotten a laugh out of someone during an interview.
That’s a bit too serious for me.