The Secret to Crafting Interview Questions

Before you can understand how to successfully write a list of questions for an interview, you’ll first need to understand what information most employers are looking for in an interview. According to industry experts, 20% of an interview is about confirming that a job candidate has the necessary hard skills to successfully complete the job’s responsibilities; the other 80% is about seeing if the job candidate would make a good cultural fit for the company (source: Fast Company). So what does this mean for your interview? It means that you’ll need to ask questions that allow you to gauge whether or not this individual would work well under the structure of your company.

So how do you craft interview questions that will allow you to understand this? Well, to get you started, we’ve included some key questions to consider asking:

• When given the choice, do you prefer working individually or with a team? Obviously if the job candidate cannot perform successfully outside of a group and your company’s employees all complete their work very individually, you’ll encounter problems.
• When starting a new project, do you prefer to be given a detailed list of instructions to carry out or simply a goal and a deadline? This all comes down to your expectations of the job candidate. That is, you must consider how your ideal job candidate will fit within the current company structure. How much oversight will be incorporated into the position? If the position involves working closely underneath a manager that needs tasks completed in a very specific way, the job candidate will need to be able to excel in a more structured environment. On the flip side, if you’re trying to fill the spot of a manager that oversees various projects, you’ll need to make sure the job candidate feels confident about being able to successfully plan, organize, and manage multiple tasks at once.
• Please describe the culture of your ideal company. Sometimes the most obvious and straight-forward questions will give you the best results. If you’re interviewing a job candidate that has done an extensive amount of research on your company, however, the response you get may not reflect the job candidate’s actual ideal work environment.

Please comment below with other powerful interview questions you’ve used in the past!