Tom Willis is an award-winning marketing leader and Co-founder of Lawpath. Tom’s journey journey includes steering several entrepreneurial projects and addressing the unique challenges faced by small businesses. As the Chief Marketing Officer at Lawpath, Tom has been pivotal in shaping the company’s marketing strategy and business growth.
Interviews aren’t simply a spoken version of a resume. They should be used to further analyse a candidate’s soft skills and their fit with your company culture. Interviews are often important for building an initial relationship and rapport between an employer and an employee. Thus, what questions you ask a candidate is key to this process. In this article, we’ll outline the questions you should ask interviewees when hiring new employees.
1. What Do You Do in Your Current Job?
You can learn more about a candidates skills and performance by asking about their current position. This allows the candidate to explain what they did in more detail than the few lines they put in a CV. Importantly, lookout for personal contributions from the candidate – what ‘I’ did, rather than what ‘we’ did.
2. Why Are You Interested in Working With Us?
This question is a basic test of preparation. Did they do research into your company when preparing for the interview? It also helps vet a genuine interest in your company. You want to be employing someone passionate about your cause rather than someone who has yet to google your company website.
3. Pitch Our Company to Us As if You Were Promoting Our Product/Service
Rather than trying to guess what kind of employee your candidate will become – see for yourself. A simple pitching exercise can both evaluate a candidate’s persuasion skills, as well as help you see what they’d be like on the job.
4. If We Hire You How Would You Help Grow the Company?
This question helps differentiate your candidate from others. Are they here to just collect a salary, or do they have an aspiration to go beyond the call of duty? Good candidates have big ideas for how your company can move forward.
5. Recount a Time You Had a Disagreement With a Colleague and How You Overcame It
This question is useful to understand how a candidate approaches an inevitable situation of conflict resolution. Interpersonal relationships are crucial maintaining a good workplace culture and this question helps you weed out potential red flag candidates along the way.
6. What Was a Big Challenge You Faced and How Did You Tackle It?
The modern workplace is dynamic with a myriad of obstacles. Asking about how a candidate overcomes challenges can help you know if you have a reliable member on the team when the rubber hits the road. This question also helps you evaluate an individual’s problem solving skills and decision making.
7. What Are Your Biggest Weaknesses?
Candidates tend to put their best foot forward, so asking about their weaknesses is undervalued. This question helps evaluate a potential employee’s reflection process and how well they understand themselves. Weaknesses are not all bad! They can be improved upon and mitigated, but honesty in answering the question is always a good sign.
8. Why Are You Leaving Your Current Employer?
This question is popular but misunderstood. You should not ask this question to trap a candidate into revealing potential rifts with their former employer. This question is useful in assessing the professionalism of a candidate – how they speak about their former employers and companies is a good indicator of how they will treat yours.
9. If I Contact Your References, What Would They Say About You?
A candidate’s understanding of how others view them can be useful to judge their awareness. A good candidate can accurately rely upon good relationships and will understand how they are publicly viewed.
10. Do You Have Any Questions For Us?
This question feels like a formality, but it’s important to encourage candidate’s to quiz you about their future workplace. What will they be tasked to do? What does a typical day on the job look like? It is important to establish expectations of your workplace from the get go, and this question helps you accomplish that.
Tips
- Make sure your candidate feels comfortable throughout the interview. That way you’ll get the best reflection of your candidate.
- Don’t be afraid to go off-script during the interview! Dive deeper into their answers or ask tangential questions. Remember, an interview should evolve like an ordinary conversation to help build rapport with a future employee.
- Make sure to not ask any questions which could be seen as discriminatory. This includes questions about the candidate’s age, race, gender or how they expect to manage a pregnancy. To clarify which questions you cannot ask during an interview be sure to consult with our lawyers.
