Interview Preparation

Better Interview Questions to Ask Candidates

By Michael R. Neece, CEO, InterviewMastery.com

This article provides hiring teams, interviewers, recruiters, and hiring managers with the best interview questions to ask to evaluate candidates.

Every hour of every business day in the US, 2.7 million job interviews happen, and interviewers continue to make the same mistakes when asking common interview questions.

Job interviewers are critical business meetings where interviewers must gather information to predict the future job performance of a stranger they have met for 45 minutes. Hiring is the only business process that tolerates bad hires and makes a hiring decision based on intuition.

The following best questions to ask during an interview will help you make better hiring decisions because your candidate evaluations will be based on solid evidence, not your gut feeling.

Your next job interview and your next hire is the most financially important time of your working life. When you know how to interview and select the best people, your career accelerates. When you make a bad hire, it reflects poorly on your business decisions and costs thousands of dollars. Their research also revealed that 66% of employers said they had experienced bad hires.

“66% of employers reported that they have experienced bad hires.”

According to the US Department of Labor, the average cost of each bad hire can equal 30 percent of that person’s annual income.

“Each bad hire costs between 30% and 100% of that person’s annual income.”

TO watch a video For the best interview questions to ask employees and external candidates click or go to https://tinyurl.com/pxvva85a

Good interview questions to ask in an interview are based on the data you need to collect to assess the candidate’s skills and make a sound business decision. If your gut is driving your hiring decisions, you’re always asking typical interview questions, and you’re not asking good interview questions, you’re going to keep making hiring mistakes.

Here’s a simple 2-step formula for creating the best interview questions for any type of job.

First, make a bulleted list of required skills.

For example, a list of project manager skills might include:

• Product management experience in an e-commerce company.
• Project management software experience
• presentation skills
• Strong spreadsheet skills
• Written and verbal communications.
• influence skills

Second, in front of (to the left of) each required skill, insert one of the following phrases:

• Give me an example of your…
• Show me a situation that highlights your skills with…
• Describe a project in which you used your…

Using this 2-step formula gives you a series of BEI questions to ask in an interview. “BEI Questions” means Behavioral Event Interview Questions.

After you ask your question, listen up!

After the candidate responds, ask a probing question such as the following:

• What did you do?
• How did you approach it?
• You learned?
• How have you applied this learning to another situation?

This probing sequence will guide candidates to answer your questions in a STAR interview format even if they are new to the STAR framework.

This 2-step formula works great if you’re creating teacher interview questions, nurse interview questions, customer service interview questions, HR interview questions, or any type of job interview.

You can use these types of questions for phone interviews, panel interviews, video interviews (Zoom interviews), or in-person job interviews. These are also great questions to ask employees during an interview when they are looking for an internal promotion.

To view a short video illustrating the latest, best practice hiring process using the best interview questions, click or go to https://tinyurl.com/pxvva85a

Sincerely,

Miguel

(email protected)