Best Questions To Ask In An Interview-For Employers and Recruiters
Best Interview Questions To Ask Candidates
By Michael R. Neece, CEO, InterviewMastery.com
This article gives hiring teams, interviewers, recruiters, and hiring managers the best questions to ask in an interview to evaluate candidates.
Every hour of every business day in the USA, 2.7 million job interviews take place, and interviewers continue to make the same mistakes by asking common interview questions.
Job interviewers are critical business meetings where interviewers must gather information to predict the future job performance of a stranger that they’ve meet with for 45 minutes. Hiring is the only business process that tolerates bad hires and making a hiring decision based on intuition.
The following best questions to ask during an interview will help you make better hiring decisions because your candidate evaluations will be based on hard evidence, not your intuition.
Your next job interview and your next hire is the most financially important moment of your work life. When you know how to interview and select the best people, your career accelerates. When you make a bad hire it reflects poorly on your business decisions and it costs thousands of dollars. Their research also revealed that 66% of employers said they’ve experienced bad hires.
“66% of employers reported they’ve experienced bad hires.”
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average cost for each bad hire can equal 30 percent of that individual’s annual earnings.
“Each bad hire costs 30% - 100 % of that individual’s annual earnings."
To see a video about the best interview questions to ask employees and external applicants click or go to https://tinyurl.com/pxvva85a
Good interview questions to ask in an interview are based on the data you need to gather to evaluate the candidate’s skills and make a sound business decision. If your instinct is driving your hiring decisions, you always ask typical interview questions, and you are not asking good interview questions, you’ll keep making hiring mistakes.
Here is a simple 2-step formula to build the best questions to ask in an interview for any type of job.
First, make a bulleted list of the skills required.
For example, a list of project manager skills might include:
- Product management experience in an e-commerce company
- Project management software experience
- Presentation skills
- Strong spreadsheet skills
- Written and verbal communications
- Influence skills
Second, in front of (to the left of) each required skill, insert one of the following phrases:
- Give me an example of your …
- Walk me through a situation highlighting your skills with …
- Describe a project where you used your …
Using this 2-step formula gives you a series of BEI questions to ask in an interview. “BEI questions” means Behavioral Event Interview questions.
After you ask your question, listen!!
After the candidate responds, ask them a probing question like the following:
- What did you do?
- How did you approach it?
- What did you learn?
- How have you applied this learning to another situation?
This probing sequence will guide the candidates to answer your questions in a STAR interview format even if they don’t know the STAR framework.
This 2-step formula works great if you are creating teacher interview questions, nursing interview questions, customer service interview questions, HR interview questions, or any type of job interview.
You can use this type of questions for phone interviews, panel interviews, video interviews (Zoom interviews), or in-person job interviews. These are also great questions to ask employees during an interview when they’re seeking an internal promotion.
To see a short video illustrating the newest and best-practice hiring process using the best interview questions click or go to https://tinyurl.com/pxvva85a
Best Regards,
Michael
