recruiting-strategy
Interview questions you should think about ditching
Pamela Weaver
HireHive
Pamela Weaver
HireHive
Pamela Weaver
HireHive
Pamela Weaver
HireHive
From advice on the strength of a handshake to how long you should maintain eye contact, there’s no shortage of “interview advice” for candidates.
Once your potential hire comes to terms with the reality that you’re going to make your mind up within a minute or so of meeting them *, it’s only reasonable to expect that they’re going to spend the rest of the interview attempting to tell you what they’ve been told you want to hear. And you’re going to help them by asking the questions they’ve Googled for.
Research shows that unstructured, vague interview questions – and the answers they elicit – are poor predictors of how anyone will perform once hired.** Why turn an opportunity for both sides to learn more about each other into an interrogation? Here are some question we think it’s time you retired.
If you want stock answers involving hard work, dedication and ambition, start here. This question also indirectly (and rather rudely) suggests you’re managing a one-way process, about which the candidate has no say. Never forget that the person in front of you is also assessing your organisation, and whether or not it’s worth their while to risk leaving their current role for you.
This post is part of our Recruiting Strategy series.
Everyone works too hard, cares too much, takes the job too seriously… A solid check of more than one reference will yield a more accurate answer.
Not the best route to uncovering attributes. If a candidate was 100 per cent happy where they are, they wouldn’t be sitting in front of you. Ask them what they like most about their current role and you’ll not only gain insight into what drives them – “I love that every day is different” – you should also see a spark of passion that hopefully overlaps with the role you’re interviewing for.
Are you offering a five year contract? As Dharmesh Shah, founder of Hubspot has put it, this is really a trap question: should the candidate give the impression that this job will be a mere stepping stone for them, or make the assumption that they’re with you for life? All this question achieves is to make the candidate do a little tap dancing, it reveals next to nothing about them or their suitability. On the other hand, it’s a good question to ask your current employees, especially if you want to keep them.
Outside of obviously skills qualifications, unless you’re hiring someone freshly graduated, this is a narrow measure of success and almost meaningless as an indicator of on-job performance.
It might make the person asking the question feel smarter, but tells you nothing about the candidate – other than their ability to Google for the answer, like you did.
* A Google search along the lines of “interviewers making their minds up about candidates inside the first minute” yields 15 million returns.
** Frank Schmidt and John Hunter, 1998 – the pair analysed 85 years’ worth of data on assessment-performance predictors. Out of 19 different techniques, the unstructured interview yielded few genuine insights into future performance or ability. You can read the paper here.
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