Recruiting & Hiring Blog for HR Professionals

Having a general outline of the types of questions to ask a potential employee is a MUST for an effective and organized interview process.

Questions that require only a “yes” or “no” answer will do you little to no good, and won’t reveal much information – but how do you know which questions will offer the most insight? All interview questions are not created equal, so know what types of questions will benefit you most before meeting your candidates. 

No HR professional wants to sort through endless stacks of resumes for every open position, but a manual hiring process often leads to this common conundrum. You know the skills and qualifications that your candidate needs to have in order to be a top performer at your company, but searching through a resume database for that one candidate that meets all of these requirements can be a time consuming process.

To easily identify top candidates, pre-screening questions can be a powerful tool in the early stages of the hiring process. While it’s always important to clearly evaluate everything that a candidate can bring to the table, a few simple “Yes / No” questions at the very beginning can save you a lot of time and energy in the long run.

Virtual interviews (or video interviews) are no longer a hiring trend—they’re commonplace. According to an August 2012 study, 67 percent of of HR managers said they conducted video interviews in the hiring process “very often,” while another 10 percent said they did so “somewhat often.” Today, we can assume those numbers are even greater.

It’s easy to see why more HR reps and managers are incorporating video interviews into the hiring process. For one, virtual interviews often save time. Some sources suggest it’s possible to conduct up to 10 one-way video interviews in the time it takes to conduct one 30-minute phone interview. Virtual interviews also allow HR reps and job candidates to get a chance to see and interact with with one another in ways phone interviews can’t match.

The interview has always been a key component of the hiring process. It’s a chance to meet applicants face-to-face to gage their personality, professionalism, and how they might fit into your company culture.

However, it’s easy to fall into a stale interview routine (asking the same questions over and over again) and seeing the same results.

When searching for a new hire, many HR representatives put the greatest emphasis on experience. It makes sense: You want to hire someone who is not only capable of performing the job you’re trying to fill but who can feel comfortable performing job duties effectively without assistance as quickly as possible. But in their quest to find the most qualified applicants, HR reps will often overlook cultural fit—that is finding a new hire who will mesh with the company culture.

There’s no denying HR representatives are responsible for a number of vital company operations. Recruiting and hiring are arguably among the most important of these responsibilities. That’s because one bad hire costs 66 percent of companies anywhere from $25,000 to $50,000 per year. And that doesn’t take into account indirect costs such as lost worker productivity and impact on overall employee morale.

Does your interview process push candidates to effectively showcase their abilities? If top candidates are often turning down your job offers, it could be because you’re not challenging them enough during the hiring process, including your interview questions.

“Top candidates routinely dislike standard interviews because they find them tedious and predictable,” says Dr. John Sullivan on ERE.net. “Most interviews are simply not designed to allow a top candidate to show off their capabilities, ideas and innovativeness.”

Interviews are a crucial step in the hiring process, but are you really using them to your advantage? Asking the right questions will ensure you have the information you need to make the best hiring decision, but your interview questions must go beyond the standard questions most job candidates have learned to expect.

Typical interview questions like, “What are your career goals?” and “What are your biggest strengths and weaknesses?” are still important ones to ask, but we can bet most job seekers already have a set of memorized answers for these standard questions. To get more insight on your candidate, you need to include some carefully prepared questions that align with your interview type and interview goals.

Here we’ve identified a few key areas you could focus your questions for your next interview:

Businesses great and small all have one thing in common – everyone needs to interview candidates during the hiring process. Whether you’re a Mom and Pop shop on Main Street looking for your very first employee, or a large organization that hires hundreds of people a year, no one makes it through the front door without meeting face-to-face for a sit-down interview.

Since interviews are such an essential part of the hiring process, we asked a few of our team members to answer the question: “What’s the most important question to ask in an interview and why?” Here’s what they had to say: