Selecting the interview questions

How many times have you turned up or about to enter an interview and think, ‘What am I going to ask the candidate?’ Or do you have a set question you always leverage for all your interviews?

The chances of a successfully assessing candidates well for the role when:

• You are making the questions up as you go along

• Leverage a set of questions that is helpful for you but potentially has limited relevance to the role / candidate you are interviewing for.

• May well be asked by other interviewers or already covered within the application process

Is there a better way to select and look at the question banks that you can have in offer and place to help drive a better hiring process?

What I often tell and guide interview teams and hiring managers to do ahead of the interviews is:

1. Review the role requirements: Before you can do anything you really need to understand the role requirements and the skills / competencies / behaviours needed within the role. Understanding this will then enable you to start working through an understanding of the types of questions to be asking.

2. Align the questions to the competencies: Once you know the competencies you can now start aligning interview questions to the overall interview process.

3. Ensure a good mix: Whilst leveraging structured interviews is incredibly important ensure there is elements of flexibility to drive the right questions and fairness within the interview.

4. Open Ended Questions: Ensure that the questions are not simply yes or no questions, ensure these allow the candidate to fully highlight and demonstrate their skills.

5. Get Feedback: Ensure that the questions written fit well for the company and the role, get some feedback from others within the team to understand how these would land and their assessment.

6. Define what good looks like: Often times interviewers build out question banks or utilise on-line question banks but will fail to qualify or quantify what a good response looks like.

Once you have completed the above and listed out the core questions for the competencies, it is also worth ensuring that the questions being used are able to assist the interviewers to get the responses that they need to evaluate the candidate. Look at the evaluation criteria and ensure that the questions are in alignment with the overall rating criteria, this will enable you to ensure that you are giving the interviewers as much information to help them assess correctly.

Case Study: Hiring SDRs

Let’s look at an example that I have helped companies in defining their overall interview question. At this FinTech I built out their interview structure for building out their sales teams from SDRs and Account Executives. Let’s take a look at the SDR role and interview question that was built.

The Problem

The company didn’t have a well defined structure in how they go and hire SDRs, they are a global business with different requirements throughout based on jurisdiction. They were in the process of expanding their sales teams at a rapid rate and needed to ensure their interview process was well defined with relevant interview structures and questions to properly assess the candidates.

Approach

I spent time with the sales leaders to understand the role they were trying to hire and built out their job description. From reviewing this we saw that the core competencies they were looking for was:

1. Communication

2. Resilience

3. Problem Solving

4. Collaboration

Once I had the 4 buckets I then broke these down to build out interview question banks to be leveraged, here is an example for Resilience:

Resilience Interview Questions

As we built this out we spent time really defining what they thought and believed resilience meant for them. This is important to understand as it helps you to define the criteria for rating and evaluating the criteria.

We came up with the following:

Once we understood this we then focussed on questions that would enable us to get to understand the candidates and thier abilities in more detail. Based on this we came up with the following questions:

• Can you describe an experience where you turned failure or a negative situation into a positive one

• Can you describe a situation where an initial client had no interest in the product or service you were offering but were able to alter this view? What was your process?

• You have been given a list of contact all have been connected with but not converted. What would be your approach?

• You have been reaching out a high-value contact with no response for several weeks. What is your next steps?

Within the questions above we leveraged a few different types including situational and behavioural, this enabled the interviewers to get the full picture when interviewing the candidates based on resilience. Once we had the questions defined we layered over this what a good response looked like inline with the scoring criteria.

Let’s look at one question in particular and the approach that was applied:

Can you describe an experience where you turned failure or a negative situation into a positive one

This question we found enabled interviewers to assess resilience, problem solving skills, ability to turn failure into results and understanding how people navigated challenges.

A good answer should convey the following key parts:

• Clearly defines a problem or challenge they face

• They take ownership of the failure not blame others

• Initiative was taken to look at moving from failure to result or good outcome

• Outcome needs to be focussed on their actions, key part to listen too

• How they applied the learning going onwards is also key part to listen too

• Very strong candidates will potentially see the broader impact of their results or failure on others and or the company results.

Communicating to interview team

It’s not just about selecting the interview questions and thinking everything is done and dusted. The next step was then ensuring that the interview team made aware of the interview questions, walk them through what a good candidate looks like and most importantly walk them through the rating criteria for the questions.

I was able to help them even further by tying this all up into interview scorecards which meant that they were able to leverage the interview questions we had devised and align this to their rating criteria.

This enabled the interview teams to be fully aligned and drive better consistency within the interview processes as well as a better interview experience for the candidate. They were significantly less likely to be asked the same interview questions. The interview scorecards were built to cover each different area of the interview process, enabled different competencies to be assessed as well as ensure we were able to get a fully picture of the candidate and their skills.

I have built interview scorecard templates which you can download for free here.

Overall

This resulted in the team hiring 20 SDRs within two weeks and all of these remaining post probation by 90%.

We were really successful in our hiring process and also improved the overall Glassdoor results and candidate net promoter scores. All of this done as we spent the time at the front of the process fully defining what we wanted to hire and what we wanted to look for.

The key part of this was fully understanding the interview questions that needed to be asked to get the information we needed. The final aspect is ensuring that you leverage feedback loops and review the data to correct course if you need to.

Enjoyed this content? Why not check out some of my other content:

• Interviewer Training Course: Looking to up skill your interview team or companies ability to hire better? Then you should come and look at my interviewer training.

• Need some content for interviewing including question banks check out my content here

• Need Interview Scorecards or a playbook for interviewing download these here

• Hiring SDRs and not sure where to advertise, post your roles here