Hiring could be tricky, especially when you’re hiring Gen Z, which will constitute 30% of the workforce by 2030. Millennials are no cakewalk either. 69% of millennials left the job, or consider to leave because of inflexible work policies. It’s tough times for recruiters to attract & retain talent. How do you navigate this? Well, you can solve this by investing in your employer brand and making your recruitment process fail-proof. One of the key ways to make your hiring approach more robust is by asking the right interview questions to candidates, as it will help you filter candidates who don’t align with your requirements. The interview questions you ask candidates could prove critical in the long run.
“How?” you ask.
Let’s understand with an analogy.
The world’s greatest investors rely on thorough and deliberate research to discover their next multi-bagger stock— the one on which they bet big. Before they invest their money into a stock they analyse market trends, the stock’s financial performance, its history, potential long-term growth, and the company’s leadership’s track record. In short, the investors meticulously perform the required due diligence to evaluate opportunities and associated risks. Talent sourcing strategies are not much different either. It’s just that, when you’re hiring, you’re investing in human talent. In talent acquisition, just like stock investment, you need to evaluate how good a candidate could be for a job position. One of the key tools to assess how deserving an applicant is for a job role at your company is the interview questions you ask candidates. The ability to ask clever questions in an interview is one of the important recruiter skills that elite TA specialists possess.
Read this insight to know different types of interview questions, and the top interview questions to ask candidates to avoid hiring horror stories, and rather find the top talent.
Types Of Interview Questions To Ask Candidates
There can be two types of interview questions to ask candidates—
- First, qualification-focused or hard skills-based interview questions reveal the prowess of the candidate at delivering the core job responsibilities. Hard skills interview questions may vary depending on the role and can be subject-matter-specific.
- Second, the soft skills-focused questions in the interview gauge how well the candidate aligns with the company’s culture, values, and mission. The soft skills-based interview questions to ask candidates can be broader and thematic in nature. These questions can be further divided into situational and behavioural questions.
Together, the aforementioned 2 types of interview questions are great for discovering top talent that helps push the company on the path to accelerated growth.
In this insight, we shall limit ourselves to discussing soft skills-related interview questions to ask candidates. However, we shall have dedicated blogs for hard skills-focused questions as well, which we may post soon. And so, if you do not want to miss any of our recruiting & hiring insights, then please subscribe to Skima blogs. For now, read this insight to find answers to the following questions-
- What soft skills-related interview questions to ask candidates and at which stage?
- How do you ensure that hiring bias is not hijacking your assessment of the answers provided by the candidates?
- How to ask soft skills-related questions the right way?
What Soft Skills-related Interview Questions To Ask Candidates, And When To Ask Them?
Before you get to what questions to ask in an interview, it is important to understand that candidates are smart today. They do their research, read Glassdoor reviews, and the interview experiences of other candidates at your company. Basically, the candidates know what questions you ask normally. So, avoid asking generic interview questions like “What is your strength? What are your weaknesses? What was the last challenging project you did?” and other regular questions. Otherwise, of course, you would get well-rehearsed and templated answers. Recruiting is hard, and it is tricky at times. Especially, if you want to hire the best.
You have to be clever with the interview questions you ask candidates, and more importantly, you’ve to ask the right questions.
But how would you decide which questions are the right ones to ask the candidate?
Start with the jobseeker persona.
Ask yourself and the members of the team you’re hiring for, “What are the personality traits they would expect in the right candidate?” Make a list of the same, and design your questions to assess the candidate on those personality attributes. It could be a candidate’s proactive learning habits, problem-solving attitude, collaboration & teamwork, context switching & multi-tasking, and so on. Pan out an ideal candidate persona and ask questions to ensure that the candidate you hire ticks most of these criteria.
Understand the roles and responsibilities
List down the challenging situations that candidates might have to go through to discharge their responsibilities. Tailor your questions that evaluate a candidate’s alignment with unique cultural aspects of the organization, and the operational environment. Skill-first hiring strategy could yield great results, but the outcomes could be much better if the candidate is also a cultural fit.
Here are 5 examples of interview questions to ask candidates to elicit authentic and genuine answers that help you spot and hire the best-fit candidate to fill vacant positions-
1. When Is The Last Time You Said “No” To An Opportunity & Why?
This is a brilliant behavioural question to ask a Gen Z candidate in an interview. They will be caught off guard. As some do not have much work experience, you don’t have many options to ask them behavioural questions in an interview. But this question is more open and broader in nature. Interviewee can reflect on an opportunity (commercial or non-commercial) from their past life wherein they chose not to engage in an act. Their response would tell loads about their value system, beliefs, and ethics.
Being a sharp recruiter, you must keenly look for any cues they drop (including red flags). It could come in handy for you to sieve out candidates who are not a fit. Additionally, you can use ethics and culture as leverage to motivate top talent to choose you over competitors. 44% of Gen Zs & 40% of millennials have turned down employers because of cultural misalignment. So, if you could highlight how your organisation aligns well with their value system, it could land you a significant edge during the recruitment process.
Pro Tip: Use AI job description generator tools to expedite your job post creation, and save the time that you would have invested in writing the JD. Use the saved time to edit the AI-generated job description, and highlight key cultural aspects in there. But keep it short.
Who To Ask This Question:
Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers
Attribute To Look For In The Response:
Values, Ethics, Motivation
2. Could You Recall A Time When You Had Too Much On Your Plate? How Did You Go About It?
14% of the time managers spend correcting the mistakes of the team they manage. In India, it’s 20%. Delegation is a key trait of high-performing managers. It can help minimize this percentage, and managers can rather use their time in more productive ways.
This is a perfect behavioural question to ask a candidate in an interview when you’re hiring for managerial positions. Listen to signals that describe their ability to plan, organize, prioritize, or delegate work.
Who To Ask This Question:
Candidates for management positions
Attribute To Look For In The Response:
Delegation, Task prioritization
3. If The KPIs Are Diving South In Red, And You Don’t Have Enough Resources To Diagnose The Problem, How Would You Go About It?
This is an example of a situational question to ask candidates in a job interview. This could tell you a lot about the critical thinking skills of the candidate, and the problem-solving skills.
- 81% of employers say critical-thinking skills in a candidate are very important.
- Only 28% of the employees are rated brilliant at critical thinking.
Ask this question to candidates in an interview when you’re hiring healthcare professionals, law practitioners, design roles, creative domains, and jobs that involve policy making. These are mainly the types of roles that demand high critical thinking.
Who To Ask This Question:
Experienced Candidates
Attribute To Look For In The Response:
Critical thinking, Problem-solving
4. Have You Ever Convinced Someone To Work With You To Solve A Problem Without Bartering Anything?
Lack of collaboration is among the top reasons driving workplace failures; 86% of employers believe this. This is a good interview question to see how persuasive and influential the candidate might be at convincing people to get tasks done.
This suits the best when hiring for sales, marketing, and product management. This type of interview questions can be followed up with additional questions such as “Do you enjoy working with a team that has dissent?”
This will disclose not just the collaboration skills, but also the communication skills of the candidate. As per research, companies that promote collaboration and communication, reduce employee turnover by over 50%.
Who To Ask This Question:
Senior roles
Attribute To Look For In The Response:
Collaboration, Communication
5. Assume You Are Required To Work In A Team Whose Members Are Infamous For Being Very Hard To Work With, and The Work You’re Supposed To Do There Isn’t Something You’ve Done Before, Then What Will You Do?
The way the candidate responds to this tricky question will unfold quite a few things about him/her.
For example, if s/he says, “The company continues to employ the peeps who are hard to work with, certainly, they must be good at what they do, and possibly their demands would also be more reasonable…,” it would show the candidate respects his/her colleagues, and understands the importance of teamwork. It’s a character trait of all great candidates. They respect all stakeholders and sacrilegiously adhere to the quality of work & deadlines.
In short, while answering the first half of the question, the candidate may share a hint or two about-
- How confident they are about their core skills and communication skills?
- How comfortable they are not being in their comfort zone?
- How good they are at amassing support/help?
- How eager they are to take on new things?
Additionally, when the candidate answers the second half of the question, they will be describing what is their learning style, and their approach to solving unique challenges.
Overall, this is a clever interview question to ask a candidate to test his/her adaptability & learning skills.
Who To Ask This Question:
Mid-level hierarchy roles in large enterprises, or senior roles in organizations with a flat or no hierarchy.
Attribute To Look For In The Response:
Adaptability, Emotional Intelligence, Resilience, Learning Skills
Tools To Build A Future-ready Workforce
Questions are a great tool for recruiters.
When you ask tricky questions in the interview to candidates, you end up gathering a lot of insights into how fit a candidate could be for the role and the company. There are a multitude of questions you can ask the candidate to assess their leadership, empathy, adaptability, resilience, problem-solving, communication, collaboration, and other key soft skills. These skills are necessary to excel in the current volatile macroeconomic environment, wherein the market changes every 5 years. And so does the skillset needed to excel. Moreover, the war for acquiring top talent is becoming more intense.
Thus, your recruiting game should evolve accordingly to keep a good talent density at your org.
- Ask the right questions in the interview to candidates to reveal hidden aspects of their personality & skills.
- Make interview processes as short as possible to simplify & accelerate the hiring process.
- Use AI recruiting tools like
- Skima’s AI Job Description Generator to create job descriptions optimized for attracting qualified leads
- Skima’s AI Matching Score product for vetting candidates against the job descriptions and finding the top candidates for a job role.
Up your recruiting game, and you’ll be able to close more awesome candidates to build future-ready workforces.
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Happy Hiring!
