ITQuest

Conducting a powerful, effective interview is an art, and learning how to do this is vital to any company's success. Interviews need to be safe, legal, and fulfill their main objective: finding the perfect fit for your company's needs.

Job Interview Questions For Successful Candidate Selection

The best job interview questions asked during an interview should be behavioral and not predictive. Here are some sample questions:

• Describe the type of work environment in which you are most productive.
• What goals, including career goals, have you set for your life?
• How would you define success?
• Give an example of a time when you motivated a co-worker.

• Give an example of a successful project you were part of. What was your role? Why was the project successful?
• Describe two situations from your past work experience in which you have determined a team was the best potential solution to a problem, a needed process improvement, or a planned change. How did each work out?
• What actions and support, in your experience, make a team function successfully?
• Have you been a member of a team that struggled or failed to accomplish its goal? If so, what assessment did you make of the reasons for the failure?

• You decided to reorganize the department or work unit that you lead. Tell me how you proceeded with the reorganization?
• Have you ever been a member of a successful team? If so, describe the role you played on the team and in its success.
• Give me an example of a time when you played a leadership role in an event, an activity, a department or work unit, or a project. Describe how you led the efforts. Tell me how people responded to your leadership.
• If I were to ask your reporting staff or your peers to comment about your leadership style, your leadership strengths, and your leadership weaknesses, how would they respond? What would this discussion tell me about you as a leader?
• Tell me about a time when you created agreement and shared purpose from a situation in which all parties originally differed in opinion, approach, and objectives.
• As a leader within an organization, you must often build support for goals and projects from people who do not report to you and over whom you have no authority. Tell me about a situation in which you demonstrated that you can build the needed support.
• What are the three most important values you demonstrate as a leader? Tell me a story that demonstrates each of these leadership values in practice within your workplace.

• Tell me about a time when you had to work closely with a coworker whom you disliked or with whom you had trouble working. What did you do to make the relationship work so you could succeed for your company?
• Tell me about a time when you disagreed with the actions or decisions of your manager or supervisor. How did you approach the situation? Was the situation resolved to your satisfaction or did nothing change?
• Tell me about a time when you worked with a friend or a coworker who became a friend. What did you do to ensure that the friendship bore positive results for your company?
• Describe a conflict you were involved in at work. How did you resolve the conflict? What happened next with that coworker or team?

• If I were to interview the people who have reported to you in the past, how would they describe your management style?
• If I were to interview your reporting staff members, how would they describe your strengths and weaknesses as a manager and supervisor?
• Give me an example, from your past work experiences, about a time when you had an underperforming employee reporting to you. How did you address the situation? Did the employee’s performance improve? If not, what did you do next?
• Rate your management skills on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 representing excellent management skills. Provide three examples from your past work experiences that demonstrate your selected number is accurate.
• Describe the work environment or culture and its management style in which you have experienced the most success.

• Information you believe to be untrue or confidential has reached you via the grapevine. What actions have you taken in the past to take care of situations such as this when communication is out of control?
• Give me an example, from your past work experiences, about a time when you were part of a project or team and you never knew what was happening with the other action items or participants. How did you handle this situation?
• Rate your communication skills on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 representing excellent communication skills. Give me three examples from your past work experiences that demonstrate the selected number is accurate.
• Describe the work environment or culture and its communication style in which you experience the most success.
• Describe five things about the communication within an organization that must be present for you to work most effectively?

Successful Interviewing Styles

Many companies are increasingly using the behavioral interview. They use a candidate's previous behavior to indicate their future performance. Depending on the responsibilities of the position and the working conditions, a candidate may be asked to describe a situation that required problem solving skills, adaptability, leadership, conflict resolution, multi-tasking, initiative or stress management. The interviewer wants to know how the candidate handled these types of situations.

There are several types of behavioral interviews.

• Structured interview with layered questions: skilled interviewers commonly use this. They ask a series of behavioral questions and non-behavioral questions. The questions often overlap and are designed to gather information about each of the major employer concerns.
• Informal interview: This type is casual and relaxed. It is intended to get the candidate talking and too friendly. The candidate may reveal more information than they might otherwise. As you know, too much information, too soon, can eliminate you from the candidate pool.
• Reverse Role interview: In this type of interview, the interviewer is unprepared, short on time, hurried, distracted, or very simply, unskilled at interviewing. As an end result, the interviewer does not ask the appropriate questions to determine if a candidate can perform successfully in the position.
• Assessment Instruments/Testing: Various types of tests are used to determine if a candidate is a good fit for the company. These types of testing may be used. Personality inventories assess personality types. Aptitude inventories assess aptitudes in certain skill areas. Interest inventories assess interests in various occupational categories. Combination instruments can be a combination of any of these.
• Combination interview: This type of interviewcombines two or more types of interviews. This could occur within the same interview, on subsequent interviews or both.

Common Interviewing and Hiring Mistakes

• Using only discussion and talking during an interview
• Evaluating a candidate based on personality, not skill or competence
• Failure to test for skills that are vital for the position
• Settling for a candidate because the perfect fit isn't yet available
• Relying only on the interview to evaluate a candidate