6 Essential Interview Questions Every Employer MustAsk

coburgbanks.co.uk /blog/assessing-applicants/6-essential-interview-questions-every-employer-must-ask/

By Anthony Hughes | Feb 10, 2015 |

It’s all well and good adopting a scientific and rigorous approach to finding candidates, whittling downand separating the wheat from the chaff. But without the right interview questions the whole hiringprocess can fall apart right at the very last hurdle.

Aside from the upheaval, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development recently revealed thathiring the wrong person costs between £8,200 and £12,000. So having gone to the trouble ofassembling the right shortlist, you owe it to yourself and your staff to make sure the interview goes toplan.

Don’t overscript your interview. You should be prepared to feed off the answers and simply talk to yourcandidate. A checklist of 100 questions can be worse than none at all and might lead to a nervousexchange of pre-prepared answers to questions they’ve run into time and again.

Follow-up questions will help you go deeper and reveal far more about the candidate, including anychinks in their perfectly prepared interview armour. Make sure you know how to spot a liar in yourinterviews too.

So feel free to chat and make the candidate feel comfortable and at ease. After all you need to seewhether they’re culturally right for your business.

But make sure you weave these essential questions into the interview. They’ll reveal a lot about theindividual and ensure that you get the right person for the job.

1. What happened the last time you made a major mistake and how didyou deal with it?

It’s a twist on the old favourite: “What is your biggest weakness?”

Instead of inviting candidates to pontificate on serial ‘weaknesses’ such as perfectionism, trying toohard and just loving their work too much, or a number of hateful alternatives that have been morerehearsed than a show at The Old Vic, make them give you a real example of them overcomingadversity.

Or not as the case may be.

Nobody is perfect and everybody makes mistakes. How we react to them is the critical part of the joband can prevent a bad day at the office turning into a real crisis.

How they answer this question will also reveal a great deal about the candidate in front of you.

What to look out for

Red flags include the obvious, refusing to acknowledge any mistakes at all, or trying to focus on blameand deflect it on to others. Their very response will speak volumes for their ability to deal with thissmall amount of manufactured pressure, too.

If the candidate goes to pieces when faced with this question, it’s a fair indication that the same thingwill happen when a crisis hits at work.

A good response will cover a relevant problem, focusing on the actual issue, rather than the blame andhow the candidate systematically overcame the individual issues to prevent a drama turning into a full-blown crisis.

Also look for the candidate’s level of self-awareness, humility and ability to acknowledge and learn frompast mistakes.

2. Can you give me example of when you exceeded expectations?

This is the chance for the candidate to shine, to tell you about that time they won ‘Employee of theMonth’ or blasted their co-workers off the sales room floor. At least that’s what they might think.

In fact, if you listen carefully, the answer to this question will reveal a great deal about the candidate’score values.

Insight like Mystic Meg…

The answer could reveal a competitive, ruthless streak that could be perfect for a Sales Executive, buta potential nightmare clash in the making with your Office Manager.

Some potential recruits will immediately launch into a diatribe about their own personal achievementscompared to their peers, which can be a sign of glaring insecurities that could mean they’ll struggle towork within a team. Others will use the opportunity to describe working closely with their colleagues tomeet and beat the goals set for them as a team.

Every position is different and you might need a certain type of character. This one question will go along way towards determining the candidate’s true goals and defining traits, for better or worse.

This question can also reveal a serial slacker that simply doesn’t understand the meaning of goingabove and beyond.

Either way, it will give you a huge amount of insight into the individual you’re interviewing and should inturn help you to form an more informed opinion about whether or not they’ll work in your business.

3. Why do you want to work for our company?

All that talk of canned questions and this old favourite still crops up. Why? Precisely because it’s onequestion that every candidate should have considered in advance.

Unless the person in front of you has applied for every job on Monster (and can’t remember your rolefrom every other they’ve applied to), they should have prepared for this question.

That means they should have researched the company, taken the time to understand the role and thentailored a satisfactory answer (preferably a brilliantly convincing one) to make sure that they ‘seal thedeal’.

It’s all in the preparation

Of course, presentation skills aren’t the most important factor with some jobs, but the majority of skilledworkers will, at the very least, have to present their ideas or arguments at some point during theirworking life and this is a clear chance for them to ‘pitch’.

You’ll learn a great deal about the candidate’s level of preparation, background research and theirability to present themselves and a reasoned argument with this one tried and trusted question.

See if your shortlisted prospects found the time to look in to your firm and assess the quality and depthof their research with this old stalwart. More impressive candidates will have done their homework.

4. Where do you see yourself in five years?

It’s another tried and trusted question, and for good reason.

Assuming you’re not just looking for a warm body to fill a space and you want to invest in your staff, it’scomforting to know that the candidate has a clear vision for themselves too.

Of course be prepared to look past the standard flannel and look for a candidate that wants to progresswithin a structured framework.

What you should be looking for

This question should reveal the goal-oriented individuals, as well as the dreamers with no clear planand a general feeling that greatness will find its way to their door.

If a candidate takes this opportunity to ask about training and career progression, it’s a good sign thatthey’re looking for a mutual commitment that can help take your company forward.

A surprising number of candidates will openly tell you their plans to travel, though, or switch pathscompletely, too, which might colour your judgement when it comes to investing tens or hundreds ofthousands of pounds in their future development.

5. Tell me about the last time you had to hit a tight deadline.

This open-ended question will reveal a number of things about the prospect in front of you:

First, you’ll find out if they’re used to working under pressure, which is a skill that can only comethrough experience.

It will also broach the subject of anti-social hours, and your prospect’s attitude towards them and howwell they work with a team.

Can they cope with pressure?

Any company, no matter how well it is run, will have high-pressure situations. It’s good to know that apotential employee has faced everything you might throw at them before and can face the most testingtimes without losing their cool.

Listen carefully to the response. How the individual worked as part of a team will be an essentialelement of the answer. In most instances, employees rarely exist in a vacuum. Therefore, a candidatethat claims all the credit for a team effort could prove to be more destructive in the long term than anemployee who’s plain lazy.

Occasionally, you’ll even get a surprise answer, an admission that the prospect does not like workingunder intense pressure, which may make for an easy hiring decision.

6. Do you have any questions?

It sounds simple, but a lot of candidates and employers are so drained by the interview process thatthey simply don’t take the final logical step and turn the tables. In my experience, the most impressivecandidates are ones that turn up with a prepared list of questions, some of which can be verychallenging.

The questions the candidate has about the company, the ethos, the working conditions and day-to-day

operations can reveal more about their character and commitment than the rest of the interview.

A prospect that has prepared thoroughly will know about your company and will ask probing questionsabout their role and so many other subjects that it could, in fact, double the length of the interview.

If it does, it’s a good sign, and it’s exactly what you want to see as an employer – someone who hastaken the time and effort to actually think about the role, the company, and the impact that they canpersonally make.

It means you have a sharp candidate that will go the extra mile, is confident enough to speak up andcommunicates well enough to deal with team members and customers alike. In short if they don’t askquestions, it isn’t a good sign, but some will not break out a list without an invitation to do so.

So offer them the floor and be prepared for questions that are just as tough as any you have throwntheir way.

Summary

Interviewing someone isn’t an exact science – it would be a lot easier if it was. The list above isn’t anexhaustive list of questions to ask, and I’m sure if you searched on Google you’d find a lot moreadvice. In fact, we’ve got a few more written here by Charles Trivett which could also help.

However these are questions that have worked for us at Coburg Banks over the years and continue toserve us well.

At the end of the day you need insight and clear information that can make your hiring decision an easyone to make. Hopefully these questions will help you get one step closer to making that happen.

Who are Coburg Banks?

Coburg Banks are an award-winning UK-based, multi-sector recruitment consultancy, specialising inthe health and social care, marketing, sales, technical, and IT sectors.

Having been in the business since 2002, we’ve headhunted, interviewed and secured thousands ofcandidates for our clients and we’ve racked up a wealth of knowledge about how to attract the mostprestigious employees to a business.

But we’re not going to keep that knowledge to ourselves…

We’ve started spreading the word with our blog, which delivers…

Cutting edge guidance, revealing how to attract and retain the best candidates, withoutwasting precious time on inappropriate ones.

More insider secrets revealing how to draw out the best (and the worst) in your interviewingcandidates.

Shocking and embarrassing true confessions from recruiters across the globe; we’ve allmade mistakes, now you can learn from them!

Enjoy and Good Luck!

Anthony Hughes

Anthony is a recruitment veteran of 18 years and is also one of the original founders of Coburg Banks.He now trains recruitment consultants on the best methods to utilise when sourcing and assessingapplicants for their clients.