As one of the most important parts of the hiring process, job interviews give you a chance to get to know job candidates to assess their suitability for a position with your organisation. With only a limited amount of time with each candidate, you will want to make sure you ask the right questions to help you make your decision about choosing the right candidate.
The best interview questions to ask candidates are those that can give you information about the interviewee both from what their answer is and how they approach the question. Consider asking some of these questions when you are next interviewing for a new job – these questions could be powerful hiring tools.
Tell me about yourself?
Although many an interviewer has asked this question, it is one of the most common interview questions for a reason.
While there is no right answer, good answers will be succinct, yet informative, and relevant to the role they’re applying for. Mentions of transferable hard and soft skills will help you understand their wider skill set. Depending on the nature of their answer, you could also use this as a springboard to ask them further questions about their experience and other things they mention in their answer.
What are your strengths? / What are you skilled at?
Finding out about what a candidate is good at is essential for helping you to make a good hiring decision. Candidates could be a good fit if the strengths they mention suit the position and align with your business/organisation’s values and practices.
If candidates use specific examples to provide evidence of where they have used their strengths this can make them more credible, and it’s also a good idea to check the validity of each candidate’s claims when you undertake reference checks. If the candidate speaks about their strengths with humility and maturity, this could also be a good sign.
What are your weaknesses?
The usefulness of this question is twofold: Taking note of how candidates respond to this question can be just as useful as what they say.
To appear as perfect as possible, some interviewees make the mistake of claiming to have no flaws, or to answer with a quality they consider to be good as their weakness. This makes this a great question to assess the candidate’s honesty and self-awareness – better answers will show these qualities. Good answers can be where a candidate identifies a weakness and then talks about how they are trying to improve on their weakness.
In cases where the candidate does talk about having weaknesses, think about whether the candidate’s weaknesses would be a significant barrier to performing well in the role, and consider whether your organisation or leadership could help them manage this or improve in this area.
What do you know about our business/organisation? / Why do you want to work with us?
Asking a variation of this question can help you figure out which job applicants have done their research about your business/organisation before applying to work with you and which have applied more randomly.
The best candidates will have a genuine interest in working with you, and they are likely to demonstrate this by having done more hard work to investigate your organisation and the job description beforehand, which would better prepare them to point to specific things they like about your organisation and be thoughtful in their answer. If their motivations for applying match with your organisation’s values and company culture, this could also mean they might be a good cultural fit.
How would others describe you?
Many hiring managers would probably know this question better as “How would your colleagues describe you?” While this is a good question to ask some job seekers, it’s important to remember that other job-ready applicants may not have recent experience that would enable them to answer this question. To help you to determine an appropriate way to ask this question, remember to look at a job seeker’s resume before the interview so you can see whether they have had recent experience or not.
In any case, this question can help you assess an interviewee’s ability to take the perspectives of others into consideration, their emotional intelligence, and whether they are a team player when they work with others. If the interviewee does have a current job, consider asking them how their current employer would describe them too. You can also assess their honesty by checking to see if what they’ve said matches with how those other people describe the interviewee during the reference checking stage of the interview process.
Tell me about a time when you had to deal with conflict
Conflict can arise in any work environment, so it’s important that your new hire knows how to deal with it.
To get a sense of their conflict resolution abilities, you could either ask them about when they have dealt with conflict in the past or ask them how they would respond to a hypothetical situation You could ask them to talk about a time in the past or you could present them with a hypothetical situation to respond to. If it’s in the past, you can also assess their self-reflection their capacity to learn from their past actions. If you present a hypothetical situation to them, you can see how quickly they think and how well thought out their idea to address the conflict is.
You can also present a specific scenario and assess if the conflict management style they propose is appropriate for the specific situation (e.g. do they try to compromise with co-workers they are having difficulties with? Do they give in to a demanding customer because it’s in the best interest of the business? When is it okay for them to stand their ground a bit more?).
It can also be worth asking other example-based questions in your recruiting strategy, where you get the interviewee to talk about a real or hypothetical example where they can show how they might respond to a situation (e.g. tight deadlines) or apply a certain type of skill (e.g. communication skills).
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