VoiceScreener is a great way to ask open-ended interview questions once, and get dozens — even hundreds — of candidates to tell you their answers. But what questions to ask? It’s easy to get overwhelmed, as was described wonderfully in the book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. To quote the author: “When we have 285 kinds of cookies to choose from in the grocery store, how can we be sure we’ve picked the right one? And that’s just cookies.”
The same can be said for the questions we ask in an interview. We’re helping our clients narrow their choices by finding the very best of the best. Here are eight of the best interview quetions we’ve ever encountered. Which one or two do you like to use the most, and why?
- What are you passionate about?
- In your supervisor role, how have you helped or influenced others to listen to you?
- Tell me what are the first 5 things you would do if you got this position?
- Tell me about the time you had to disagree with your Manager and what did you do about it.
- Tell me about a time you had a conflict with your superior and how you handled it.
- What risks did you take in your last position?
- Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a peer in your organization and how you handled it.
- Name a time that you made a mistake and what you did to fix.
Please leave your comments. Which questions are really, really good? Which are really, really bad? We’d love to know!
Graphic courtesy of sshb presented under creative commons license.
This article was filed under Best Practices, Candidates & Applicants and given the following tags: best interview questions, interview questions, paradox of choice.
I like these:
3. Tell me what are the first 5 things you would do if you got this position?
This tells you how far ahead the person plans and how well they’d fit the position. If they don’t know what they’d do during the interview, they won’t know what to do when you hire them.
6. What risks did you take in your last position?
This is a great question because some employers don’t want you to take big risks. It also exposes those who never take risks; those people usually don’t innovate, and they usually don’t have much self confidence.
Thanks for your comment.
I also like the question about risk-taking. It does the things you listed, and it also may reveal employees who aren’t doing a thorough job of risk analysis. It’s good to know in advance is someone isn’t good at seeing all the potential costs of taking a certain action.
If also provides an opportunity for explaining what the applicant did to mitigate those risks.
[...] have been covered on this blog in the past, in our July post (Overlook these 8 interview questions at your peril!) or our August post (How revealing! More of the best interview questions of all time), or even last [...]
[...] Overlook these 8 interview questions at your peril! [...]
[...] Overlook these 8 interview questions at your peril! [...]