Moving beyond boring: Spice up your interview questions

The vast majority of hiring managers admit to making at least one bad hiring decision in their careers. While common, the results can impact every area of a company – from the employee morale levels to financial earnings. A bad hire is any employee with a low productivity level, poor performance and an inability to fit in with the company’s culture, along with one who leaves within the first year.

The Brandon Hall Group’s “2015 Talent Acquisition Study” discovered that 95 percent of organizations of varying sizes admitted that they make bad hires every year. This monumental figure raises the question: What can companies do to make smarter hiring decisions? During the course of the study, the researchers found that 69 percent of those surveyed stated that a broken interview process had the greatest impact on the quality of their new hire. The researchers urged that companies should standardize the interviewing process with a checklist of set questions each recruiter must ask.

“A checklist of questions for interviewers to choose from in each interview phase is a great tool, no matter how experienced the interviewer is,” the study stated. “Consistency is important. Organizations must ask candidates the same or very similar questions, in order to compare answers and evaluate who is the best fit.”

Make sure your questions are unique to your business, not just generic industry-focused ones.

Make sure the questions are job related
While consistency is key to comprehensively and equally vetting each candidate, sometimes the problem is that hiring managers are simply asking the wrong questions. They might not effectively articulate their company’s culture, the job requirements or even ensure that all the questions are job related at all, according to Fast Company. Many high-profile companies are famous for asking random questions, such as, “How would you direct someone else on how to cook an omelet?” or, “If you were to get rid of one state in the U.S., which would it be and why?”

Despite this flashy interview appeal, you must first ensure that all your question are completely job related. Otherwise, you may hire a candidate based on their personality or wittiness, not their ability to perform their job. This will unfortunately lead to yet another poor hire.

However, don’t be afraid to spice it up a bit
However, asking the same, tired questions over and over again will lead to a poor hiring decision as well. The majority of job seekers have already memorized the answers to “what is your greatest weakness” and “where do you see yourself in five years,” so please stop asking them. Hiring managers will never be able to fully get to know their candidates, which makes it challenging to hire the right individual.

For example, instead of just asking your candidates what they know about your organization (information they likely quickly gathered from your website), ask them about what business opportunity they think you should look closer at, according to Business.com. This may include another company you should partner with, a business market your company might benefit from expanding into and more. This one question will separate those who are just casually applying from those who truly want the job and know the industry.

Sit down as a team to come up with probing interview questions that are unique to your company, not to your field as a whole. If you want to hire applicants who will support your business, you don’t want to vet them with generic questions. Therefore, consider spicing up your interview flow to hire only the most well-suited candidates for the job.

To further weed out unqualified candidates, consider implementing pre-employment testing into your hiring process. These skills tests provide reliable results at the click of a button, ensuring that you can hire better, more quickly.