4 Tips for Writing Great Interview Questions
Tips for Great Interview Questions
We all have our favorite interview question. That one which we’ve asked hundreds of candidates over the past few years. The question with the tricky ending only the best candidates get.
But how can you ensure that groups across your entire company are asking the most effective questions?
At Brilliant Hire, we spend a lot of time thinking about the elements of a great interview question. After looking at thousands of questions and how candidates respond to those questions, we have a few insights which we believe will help you get the most out of your interviews.
First, test the key skills for the role and decide who tests what
Before writing interview questions, the first step is to understand what the important skills, characteristics, and/or various needs are for the job you’re hiring for. This may sound obvious but surprisingly is a step often skipped in the rush to find a good candidate. By writing out these skills in a clear, concise way, it will ensure your team is all on the same page about the profile you are looking to hire. You should be clear that each question is testing a skill that is directly related to the job.
As you build out the team of people who will interview new candidates, make sure each interview tests the candidate on different skills. If one interviewer is asking about creativity, another interviewer might test for productivity. Then at the end of the day, when interviewers come together and share insights your team will build a full perspective of each candidate.
One trap that I fell into quite a bit early in my interviewing career was falling off topic with the candidate and simply following tangents in the conversation, only to realize the whole hour was gone and I had not asked any of the questions I needed to. If you and your team have mapped out the skills you need to test ahead of time and have a planned debrief following the interview, it will put an added pressure on you to really test the outlined skills during your hour time slot.
Second, questions should be open ended and provide a space for the candidate to explore.
Questions should be more than just a yes or no answer, which prevent the interviewer from gaining insight about how the candidate thinks. By providing a space for exploration, you will gain a deep understanding of how the candidate works in a real-world setting.
Let’s look at an example…
Design an effective lesson plan for a 5th grade class.
This requires the candidate to go through 3 steps
- Define what “effective” means
- Brainstorm potential ways to teach the class
- iterate through the ideas and rank each by the effective measure
During each of these steps, the interviewer gets insight into how the candidate views the world. This insight can help the interviewer make a stronger decision on whether or not that candidate would be an effective hire for the company.
Third, get the candidate to think outside of their box.
When a candidate walks into a job interview, they have likely spent hours preparing, practicing, and scripting out their answers to standard interview questions. For an interviewer, this makes it extremely hard to understand what a candidate truly believes rather than what they have practiced. Think about yourself. When you’re having a conversation with a colleague, you will speak differently than a presentation to your entire team.
One simple way to get candidates thinking outside of the box is to ask the questions from a different point of view. For example, you might ask the candidate what they would prioritize if they were hiring for this role. This pushes candidates to think from a new view by shifting perspective from the candidate to the hiring manager.
While interviewing for a recent developer role, our team asked a simple, yet powerful question to expose candidates to a new way of thinking. It goes like this “Imagine you are heading to get coffee in the kitchen and you happen to meet the CEO of SAP who is also getting coffee. You have 5 minutes to chat with him, what do you say?”
While everyone was a bit surprised and cautious about how they would respond, we noticed the difference between the best and worst candidates was not in what they said, but how they said it. The best candidates quickly moved past this nervousness and brainstormed out loud about the potential conversations they could have. By doing this, we moved beyond candidates canned answers and into a mode where we worked together on the question.
Finally, seek stories from your candidates.
Evoke specific stories to learn about what your interviewee does, and more importantly, thinks and feels about certain situations. When interviewing candidates, you must ask questions to learn about the past and present, not just the future. Asking a question such as “Could you tell me a story about a time . . .” gives the candidate the ability to leverage their past experiences and tell you a compelling story. It gives you, as an interviewer, the ability to evaluate how well candidates reflect on their past, which is often a powerful sign of a candidate’s ability to learn from past experiences.
While hearing the candidate tell their story, continually ask why. This short, yet powerful, question can help you understand the motivations behind a candidate’s story.
There you have it, the 4 steps to writing a great interview question:
- Test the key skills for the role
- Questions should be open ended and provide a space for the candidate to explore
- Get the candidate to think differently
- Seek stories from your candidates
Remember, interview questions are often the most important part of the interview process. Writing/choosing bad interview questions can have a massive impact on your company’s talent acquisition strategy. Don’t let bad questions hurt your company.
You can read what others think about this topic here…
- 40 Favorite Interview Questions from Some of the Sharpest Folks We Know, First Round Review
- The Empathy Map produced by the Stanford d.school can be a great tool for unpacking candidate interviews.
