The 10 Best Questions to Ask a Job Candidate
By Paul Feeney, President, Sanford Rose Associates
It’s the ‘Main Event’ – the face-to-face interview – at which new careers
will be launched or left at the dock. The employer is deciding whether to
extend a job offer, while the candidate is deciding whether to accept one
if offered.
WHAT NEXT? All to often, the interview proceeds as follows:
- Interviewer – I see you graduated from Yale.
- Candidate – Yes, great school.
- Interviewer – And your pharmaceutical experience includes eight years
with Eli Lilly? - Candidate – Nine, actually. Then on to Pfizer.
- Interviewer – Well, we’re not yet as large as those two firms, so everyone
has to wear lots of hats. Do you mind long hours? - Candidate – Not at all. I always do whatever it takes…
This is clearly an interview that’s going nowhere. Totally monotonous and stuck in an endless
loop of resume verification and leading questions. Indeed, no effort is required to conduct it. By
contrast, great interviews require a clear understanding of what information the interviewer hopes
to obtain – and what kinds of questions will produce the intended results?
Here are ten questions that do an especially good job of revealing what makes a candidate tick…
- Tell me a little about yourself. Few people anticipate this disarming request, which causes
them to think on their feet, decide what information they want to convey and organize a
concise response. Non-threatening and - Open-ended, it makes a good first question.
- In your current job, who is the person you report to – and what are his or her
responsibilities? By asking candidates to define the boss’s duties, you have made it more
difficult for them to exaggerate their own scope of responsibility. - I’ve read the various accomplishments you’ve cited on your resume. But if you had to pick
the single greatest contribution you have made to an employer, what would that be? Many
books on resume writing encourage laundry lists of achievements – e.g., increased
production by 23 percent, reduced scrap by 15 percent, etc. This question is designed to
elicit how the candidate views his or her true impact on organizational performance. - All of us have a combination of strengths and weaknesses. Can you tell me a shortcoming
that affected your work performance and what you did to address it? It’s one thing to know
that one is too demanding of others (or whatever the shortcoming is). More important,
faced with that insight, was the candidate able to modify personal behavior in a way that
ameliorated the problem? - If I were to ask your fellow workers to describe you, what would they say? This question,
along with number 4, is based on a relatively new concept known as “Emotional
Intelligence” – which measures self-awareness, - Especially in dealing with other people. If you ask it, get beyond the glib response and dig a
little, i.e., “What else would they say?” - Like people, companies are a mix of strengths and weaknesses. What are some of the
things your present company could do to be more successful? Strong managers have to
deal with organizational effectiveness in all of its complexities. This question is a good
predictor of how the candidate would function in your organization. Look for responses that
address a wide range of issues – people, products, processes and markets. - Tell me about some of the people you’ve hired in recent years, how they’ve worked out and
what you did with any poor performers. In addition to a candidate with good
self-awareness, you want a candidate with sound insights into others. How does the
interviewee go about hiring people, evaluating them and taking corrective action? - What risks have you taken in your current job, and what were the results? There’s an old
adage, “If you haven’t crashed and burned a few times, you haven’t flown high enough.”
Well, maybe. There are three - Categories of risk-takers: those who take foolish risks, those who take prudent risks and
those who are risk-aversive. Most likely, you are seeking the individual who is not afraid to
take prudent risks – particularly of
high magnitude. Give extra points to the candidate who mentions a failure as well as a
success.
When you have the kind of “drop-everything” crisis at work, what techniques do you use to
enlist the help of others? Various people have various management styles, ranging from
dictatorial (“Call your wife and
tell her you’ll be working all night”) to beseeching (“Do you think it would be possible to stay
a bit late and help out?”) Look for the style that will best fit your corporate culture. By the
way, the shrewdest answer to this question is probably, “We have such a close-knit team
that has worked on such a wide range of challenges, I don’t even have to ask. Everyone
knows instinctively when it’s time for the tough to get going.”
Setting aside compensation and perks (which we’d all like to have more of), what changes
or improvements in your current work situation would make the job so attractive that you
wouldn’t want to leave? This very good last question accomplishes three distinct goals.
First, it identifies those work-related values – title, responsibility, opportunity to manage
others, professional growth, advancement, recognition, geographic location, community
resources, family time, flexible hours, etc. – that the candidate holds to be important but
finds lacking in the current job. Second, if you decide to offer that person the position, you
know which attributes of the new job that you and your search consultant should
emphasize – and which to steer away from. And, third, if the successful candidate receives
a counter-offer upon resignation, you can remind the individual – their own words – of the
current situation’s shortcomings, most or all of which will still exist.
ONE SMALL WORD OF WARNING!
These and similar questions need to be asked but once during the day; more often is
counter-productive. Therefore, take the time to convene the interviewing panel in advance and
decide who will ask which questions.
Paul Feeney is currently the President of Sanford Rose Associates, an Executive
Search Firm located in Butler, New Jersey. Sanford Rose Associates was founded in
1959, is a full-service executive search organization conducting retained and
contingency searches through a network of 60+ offices worldwide devotes its practice
to all areas of finance, accounting, general management, operations, technology,
management consulting and project management for national and international
searches. Paul has over 14 years of executive search management and corporate
recruiting experience while working in New York, London and Prague. To contact Paul,
please call 973-492-5424, fax 973-492-5422, e-mail [email protected] or
visit www.sanfordrose.com/wayne.
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