My Go To Interview Questions
At it’s very core business is about people. I don’t mean that in a ’people are our greatest asset’ glib kind of a way - businesses are fundamentally social enterprises which succeed or fail on the strength of their culture and people. Finding, hiring and growing (retaining) the best possible people is one of the core responsibilities of leadership.
Over the years I’ve
had the opportunity to find, interview and (mostly) hire some awesome
people from all walks of life over the years which has helped me to hone
my recruitment skills and build up a toolbox of resources which help
in making sure I’m hiring the best possible person.
One of the keys to hiring the right person is to ask the right questions and I thought I’d share some of my ‘go to’ interview questions with you. The standard 'can you tell us about a time when…’ style questions don’t really scratch the surface for me plus they are so predictable you can almost coach candidates how to answer them. No, to really assess a candidate you have to go off script.
When hiring I look for two specific things - attitude and aptitude, everything else can be taught. Specific technologies, languages and frameworks come and go and those can be learned easily enough by candidates who have the right aptitude. Teach someone to be anything other than who they are (attitude) is impossible; hence my focus on attitude and aptitude. Cultural fit and self-awareness are two other key indicators I look for in an interview.
So without further ado, below are a selection of my go to interview questions along with some rationale and explanation for the usage of each.
Looking back on your career to date, what would you list as your key accomplishments?
This helps me to understand what the candidate values and how they represent their accomplishments. It’s an open ended question and allows me to establish what line of questioning I want to follow for the remainder of the interview. I often follow this up with a question about ‘the top three factors that contributed to those successes’ if I want to dig a little deeper.
Based on your experience in previous roles what would you say are the elements of culture that empower and disempower team members?
This gives you a clear sense of the value a candidate puts into culture and how they have experienced previous organisations & teams. I like to probe with a follow up question about their last place of work to see whether they simply write off the culture of the place or can separate the bits that worked well from the bits that needed improvement.
What are the characteristics of the best team (boss) you’ve worked with?
This gives me a sense of what sort of leadership/direction this person thrives under and what sort of team environment gets the best out of them. It also shows some self-awareness - knowing what types of personalities the candidate works well with is a good sign of being highly self-aware. I tend to look for candidates who value culture and thrive in a collaborative environment - putting as much emphasis on how things are achieved as on the results themselves is a good sign that the candidate values culture.
Describe a situation where you were asked to do something you thought was beyond your skills and capabilities?
The reaction to such a request is what I’m most interested in - did the candidate roll their sleeves up and try a few things or did they surrender at the starting line? Does the person thrive on stretch goals or are they more of a ‘familiar territory’ sort of a person.
Describe how you’ve handled a conflict with a co-worker in the past?
I’m looking for both conflict management skills but importantly self-awareness. Conflict in inevitable - especially in high performing teams - so its about how it’s handled. What does the person consider a reasonable response to conflict and can they see both sides? Can they extract themselves from the specifics of the situation and show they learned something from the experience?
What sort of feedback do you like to receive and how often?
Understanding a candidate’s desire or hesitation to receive feedback tells you a lot about their working style. The type and frequency of feedback is often a reflection of an organisations culture and can be a great indicator for what type of culture the person enjoys working in.
Hopefully you find those useful and maybe even insightful - they have been built up over time (with input from lots of different places) and you’re welcome to use/tailor all and any of them to your needs.
I’m always looking to improve my recruitment toolkit so let me know what your ‘go to’ interview questions are.
* For specific roles we do have specific questions/interviews - for
example, we do aptitude and psychometric testing depending on the role.