Asking the wrong questions when interviewing candidates can lead to bad hiring decisions. Preparing your questions in advance is crucial for identifying someone who will enhance your team, both in skill and in compatibility. Here are four types of questions to help you learn the most about your candidate.
1. Warm-up questions. While it may be tempting to jump right into tough questions, ease in by introducing yourself and asking the candidate to walk you through their background.
2. Abilities and qualifications questions. To assess a candidate’s hard skills, ask them to share what they’re great at, good at, or need improvement on. Open-ended questions—for example, “What are some tools you’ve used to tide over a productivity crunch?”—can reveal a lot about a candidate’s technical and problem-solving skills.
3. Behavioral questions. These are essentially role-play scenarios that gauge how a candidate will respond in specific situations. This is a great way to assess soft skills like communication, teamwork, adaptability, and critical thinking.
4. Workplace-alignment questions. It’s important to try to get a sense of whether a candidate will align with the organization’s dynamics and your management style. For example, if you’re part of a startup that encourages unconventional ideas, then calculated risk-taking is a necessary skill. You might give an open-ended prompt like: “Describe an experience where you took risks. How did that play out?” |
