17 Interview Questions To Hire World-Class Leaders
Having the answers to only a few decisive questions is all you need to hire the best leaders for your company.
Read the questions first, and deep-dive afterward why they are structured and ordered like this.
- What was the best and the worst business book you ever read?
- Tell me about 2 companies that have an outstanding vision or mission.
- Which KPIs would you choose to measure the overall company success if the number of KPIs is limited to 4?
- What will be your impact on our company evaluation?
- Do you have an idea about a potential pivot of our business or company?
- Who is your role model in terms of leadership?
- What will your leadership style specifically bring to the team?
- How do you measure your leadership performance?
- When do you make decisions against your team? Give 3 examples.
- How do you create a high-performance culture?
- How do you enable your teams to think out of the box? Tell me about 2 concrete examples and the achieved team results.
- Have you changed your leadership style over the last years?
- What was your biggest leadership failure with an adverse impact on the team or even the company?
- Did you ever struggle with your performance or with yourself?
- Tell me about a situation where you gave up.
- Rate your boss on a scale from 0–10. If the score is 10: Why do you want to leave? If the score is below 10: Why not 10?
- Surprise me with something that is not mentioned in your resume.
- What’s your greatest success you are proud of?
Why these are the most relevant questions for hiring leaders
Besides professional expertise, leaders must have the capabilities to impact your company, culture, and people in an authentic way.
Successful leaders have strong personal beliefs about visions, KPIs, and their impact on teams and the company. Often, they are good storytellers of outside perspectives, role models, and other companies. Their stories are full of concrete examples and emotions, and they avoid general or abstract statements.
Being authentic is one essential characteristic of world-class leaders.
They often reflect a lot about their leadership style and are always thriving for improvements.
Talking with leaders about their failures, former bosses, and asking for additional topics not listed in the CV can sometimes reveal some new surprising aspects.
The logic behind the order of the questions
Starting with questions on the company level is neutral and enables the candidate to start the interview in his comfort zone.
With each item, you dig deeper and deeper into the candidate’s characteristics and values. The last two questions are more relaxing for the candidate and ensure a positive mood in closing the interview.
Paying attention to body language changes during the whole interview is super important.
Good leaders will answer all questions with more or less the same body language. A slight shift in body language often says more than the spoken content.
How to prepare and structure an interview with this list
Of course, you will start the interview with some warm-up talk. Continue with your questions regarding the desired professional expertise for the role. Don’t ask too many of them — you are hiring a leader, not a senior expert!
After that, you will go through this list. And add another small talk at the end of the interview as well.
You need proper time management. Before the interview, tell the candidate how it is structured and that you have a bunch of questions. Ask the candidate to be spot on in his answers and also mark some questions for yourself as optional.
Outstanding leaders are to the point and will be able to answer the questions in a focused way in time.
