Screening Employees
Effective Interviewing: Asking the Right Questions
By Kevin Turco
Dec 26, 2005, 21:54

Your sales manager just turned in his resignation. None of the current sales staff is qualified to take on a managerial role, so you’ve posted your job opening on the web. Within 10 minutes you receive three responses. By the end of the day there are 20. All the resumes have merit and each potential employee looks qualified. How do you choose the one that will exceed expectations, fit in with your company’s culture and ultimately improve your business? Asking the right questions during an interview could solve the problem and help to avoid poor performance and a need for re-hire down the road.

Victoria Hoevemeyer’s book High-Impact Interview Questions outlines a method of Competency Based Behavioral Interviewing, and lists 701 interview questions that can be used to determine the competency of a candidate through past performance and past behavior.

Hoevemeyer recommends asking open-ended questions. By asking questions beginning with “Tell me about…” or “Give me an example where…” you’ll discover how the interviewee responds to high-pressure situations and what type of character traits they possess. Leadership, communication, conflict management and pro-active skill sets can all be uncovered with the right probing questions.

Here are two examples:

• Tell me about a time in your former job when you had to terminate employment of one of your staff.

• Have you ever had to change a policy procedure within the company? How did you facilitate making sure your department understood and complied with the new change?

There are more traditional questions, like “where do you see yourself in five years?” or “If you could have your choice of job what would it be?” but these questions usually have rehearsed answers and little bearing on whether or not the candidate is competent at the position you’re looking to fill. The more you can stick to probing past behavioral questions the greater success you’ll have at choosing the right person to complement your business team.

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