Interview questions

The other day, I tweeted: “Interviewing someone tomorrow. What’s your favourite interview question? Heard some great ones before, but thought I would throw the question out again.”

Twitter is a great resource for questions like this, and fairly quickly I got back several ideas, along with a request to summarise them:

• What is the biggest mistake you have made… and how did you recover / learn from it? Whingeing_Pom
• What are you most passionate about? WorkInColour
• What changes would you introduce in your current position that would make you stay there? dwinter
• Ask them to tell me a story for each core value JHenning
• What are the mistakes you see most people making in this situation etc? KenBurgin
• Reference question: Would you employ this person again? Why/why not?  dwinter

Previously when I have asked this question, I have received:

• At some stage in the interview ask them what they think of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Although the person who suggested the question, as well as myself, are big Buffy fans, they said, the answer doesn’t matter, what matters is whether they say what they think regardless of your opinion or try to work out what answer they should be saying. I have never asked this question, mainly because I couldn’t do it with a straight face, but it does raise an interesting point. Interviewees can research your website and you (if they know who the interviewer will be) and work out the answers you want to most questions – is that what you want? If they answer what you want, but it isn’t true for them, then that will come out when they start to work with you, and it will cause problems. Often it will impact the whole team, and you have to adapt the team to their style, educate them and change their cultural approach, or find a replacement.  All of which can cost the business quite a lot.
• Ask them to describe their favourite boss. I have asked this one, and it has been very useful. Once someone said I can’t describe my favourite boss, but I can describe someone I really didn’t like as a boss and why. That worked equally as well. After having a team for several years, with some quite open staff giving feedback on my management style, I am quite aware of what I do well, what I need to improve, and what I naturally do and probably won’t change. If someone describes a workplace that isn’t Tribe Research then they are not going to be happy working for me.

This time, I didn’t ask any of these questions directly, although the conversation did ‘circle around’ some of them. They were a great refresher on thinking about what I wanted on the team and whether the candidate would be that.