If you're unemployed and sick of all the advice out there for prospective interviewees on how to prepare for that elusive interview, here are a few tips for employers on good code of conduct when grilling job applicants.

1. Read the candidate's CV carefully. Meeting a prospective employee and knowing nothing about him/her or getting all the facts wrong will not elicit the best from the candidate in question. I once applied for a job with a British member of parliament who seemed convinced that I'd worked for the Guardian. If I'd done so I wouldn't have been approaching him for a position as a humble parliamentary assistant. Another time, because I was living temporarily in digs in a church rectory, the interviewer wanted to know if I was a vicar's son. But with a name like Gabriel Hershman, would I really be?

2. Do not be too preoccupied about why they left their last job and what went wrong.
After all, it could have been a simple personality clash. Think ahead and ask yourself if this person could do something RIGHT for your company.

3. Don't try to intimidate your intervieweee. If one of you on the interview panel is too obviously playing "bad cop" - the other "good cop" - this will come across as clearly staged behaviour. Your job is not to perform a psychological demolition job but to discover the suitability of the candidate in question.

4. If a person has come a long way to be interviewed, you could make the point of thanking them for coming even if you have no intention of hiring them. And while we're on the subject of addresses, please don't belittle the interviewee's neighbourhood. Once I went for an interview at Conservative Central Office and the interviewer asked me: "So tell me, how do you keep yourself entertained in the jungles of Haringey"? (a black area in London) If I'd had a tape recorder running or hidden camera it could have created a scandal.

5. If you really have no intention of hiring someone, don't engage them in a 15-minute conversation about their holiday plans. One interviewer, on discovering that I'd lived in Portugal, engaged me for 20 minutes about the relative merits or otherwise of Lisbon as a holiday destination. With hindsight I'm sure he'd decided he didn't want me by that point.  He was just using me as a guide book.  

6. Don't assume just because the interviewee is sweating that he/she is naturally nervous. After all, a little nervousness is natural in a job interview. Alternatively, it could just be a hot day.

7. Don't get bogged down in "gaps" in a prospective employee's CV. Young people will inevitably have gaps where they travelled abroad or did unconventional things. Don't just assume they were in jail.

8. Don't take your interviewee through an endless list of hypothetical situations. Some people simply don't react well to this form of questioning.  Besides, they'll just try and guess what you want to hear anyway.

9. If you don't want the person concerned, it's only courtesy to get back to them as soon as possible after you've made the decision not to shortlist them. And I don't mean a few weeks later. I mean within a week.

10. You could offer to make a contribution to the cost of the interviewee's transport fare. I once travelled all the way from London to Ashford to attend an interview, a round trip of 180 kilometres. Needless to say, I was considerably out of pocket as a result.  Grrrr...