Interview Questions for HR Professionals

Human Resource (HR) is a very important part of every organization. From recruitment, to discipline, employee relation management, training and development, workplace safety, and many such important department are handled by HR professionals. Small companies usually have a general HR professional that can handle work in all the above mentioned areas. Whereas a big company have multiple HR specialist professionals each with a specific expertise.

Interview questions for a HR specialist include questions that can help in judging the candidate’s level of expertise towards his/her specific genre as well as behavioral and situational interview questions to judge the candidate’s capability to work in other areas and department.

Experience

Experience play an important role in deciding a candidate’s suitability for a role. Therefore, questions seeking knowledge about previous work experience are very common during a HP professional’s interview. However instead of general, no-specific interview questions, questions are weaved to get more specific information about your work history.

Be prepared to answer questions like – “Have you ever done recruitment for a technical position?” or “What is your approach when you have to hire for a computer programming applicant?”

Situational Interview Questions

Since dealing with employees of an organization is an important part of HR’s working, therefore situational interview questions are used for determining an HR’s job competency level. Some examples of situational interview questions are

“How would you handle a situation when an employee is not happy with your company’s HR policy?”

“What approach will you take to investigate an employee’s complaint about workplace harassment?”

“How will you ensure that your employer is maintaining workplace safety?”

Career Development

Although an HR specialist’s job is to work in one human resource discipline, some interviewer plan to expand the working horizon of HR to other areas as well. Therefore, they explore the suitability of the candidate to work in other areas of HR department. Questions like, “What is your experience of organizing training for employees?” or “Have you ever thought of cross-training in other HR specialist areas? If yes, which department would you like to experiment?” “Have you come across situation when you had to handle responsibility of your colleagues in HR department?”

Professional Qualities

In addition to being good in their job, it is important for an HR professional to have high levels of professionalism, confidentiality, and strong commitment of serving employee needs. Therefore, questions that can help judge professional characteristics of a candidate are important part of a HR interview. Typical questions include, “What characteristics do you think you have that can help you succeed as a HR professional?” “How would you resolve conflict between two employees when one of them is your close friend?”