Interview Questions You Should Ask Candidates

Finding new employees for your company isn’t always easy, especially when you’re getting hundreds or even thousands of applications. Asking the right questions will help you find the best candidates for whatever positions you are trying to fill. The latest trend is asking interviewees brain teaser questions that had nothing to do with the role they’re applying for. This is a waste of time and should be avoided altogether. Instead, you should focus on picking the applicant’s brain. According to an audit done by Google, there is no correlation between candidates answering brainteasers and how well they can perform a job. So it’s a horrible way to try and predict the candidate’s attributes. Instead, you should focus on behavioral questions and then evaluating the answers that you receive.

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Using Behavioral Questions for Predicting the Future




Asking questions about the candidate's behavior (but not directly) can help you to analyze their future behaviors at your company. For instance, you can ask questions about how they would react in certain situations or how they would handle a hardship related to their role at your business. After asking a series of questions, you will need to analyze the answers to determine:

• How the candidate would react to a real-world scenario
• What the candidate would consider to be a hard problem to resolve.

Before the Interview

It's important to be prepared for the interviews that you have, which is why it's a good idea to go over what you plan to ask. Here are a couple of ways that you can determine which questions to ask:

• What skills are needed in order for the position to be done adequately? Consider much-needed skills that are required, that you may not be able to teach them.
• Make a list of the most important components for the role. Try to keep it to a short bulleted list of three to five.
• What do you consider to be A-players for your organization? Write down what drives the success of your company and use that as a model.
• What are you willing to teach? This will give you an idea of what skills are optional, rather than mandatory.
• Write down which questions you want to ask each candidate so that you can accurately rate them against each other.

Once you have conducted the interview, make sure to look for patterns in the answers that were given to see what type of employee they would be.

See the following articles for more information:

• 21 Major Interview Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs
• The Best Way to Prepare for a Job Search and Interviews
• How to Talk About Other Interviews in Your Interviews
• How to Answer the Tell Me About Yourself Interview Question
• How to Answer the Do You Have Any Questions for Me Interview Question

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