“Ask the right questions, and the answers will always reveal themselves”
- Oprah Winfrey
Do any of these sound familiar?
- Please sell me this pen
- If you could be an animal, what would you be?
- Describe your personality using …
- How did your childhood shape your professional life?
- What is your 5 year plan?
Ouch, what are these types of interview questions going to reveal about a candidate? Job-relevant responses? Unbiased opinions about the answers? How much pressure do you put on a candidate without much science backing up this line of questioning?
There is definitely another way, and one that will help you assess a candidate’s suitability for hiring. But creating the right questions can be daunting, here are a few things to remember:
The Basics
- Ask open ended questions: start these with what, how, why. Closed questions limit the information that you can fairly evaluate.
- Get the candidate to provide you with examples from their experiences. Real experiences will give you a sense of how a candidate may handle a future situation.
- Don’t ask obscure questions that are personal.
Some of our most popular questions to ask:
- Walk us through your resume - this makes a candidate feel welcome to share their experiences and encourages a fuller answer.
- Why would you want to work for us? This shows motivation about the candidate’s intentions in joining your organization.
- Share your proudest achievement. Focuses on what value a candidate can bring to the role.
More advanced ideas: need a bit more information?
- Use the STAR method to build your questions:
- Situation - get the candidate to share a past experience.
- Task: understand what goal was the candidate working toward?
- Action: encourage the candidate to share the actions they took to address the situation.
- Result: what was the end result of the candidate’s actions?
By approaching questions in this way you are able to understand the candidate’s world of work, their motivations, their self-awareness about the actions they take and what they learn from working.
Here is an example of using this method for a sales representative type role:
- Share your personal experiences of your approach to building relationships and impact with your prospects/clients/customers. What have been the results of your approach?
- When handling objections from a prospect, how do you ensure that you achieve the sale? Share an example.
- Share how you reached one of your proudest achievements in sales.
- How do you maintain optimism in stressful times? Share a time when you had to use optimism to overcome a tough situation. What did you do? How was the end outcome?
- Share an example of a time when you solved a problem using creativity or innovation. What impact did this have on the company?
Does myInterview have templates of questions to choose from?
myInterview does have a variety of pre-built templates that can save you time in designing questions.
I need help with questions and template design!
Our professional services team can assist you in building robust question templates linked to roles/competencies/skills, reach out and we will be happy to help.
Summary: make sound hiring decisions by creating high quality questions - the hiring will be a cinch!
