May 20, 2008

Celebrating 10 years
of proven results.

Welcome. What's New?

In our first 2008 newsletter, we started our series on proven strategies to guide you through a well-planned interview and selection process. In this issue we explore best practices around developing interview questions so that you are prepared when you sit face to face with your candidate.

Best Practices for Developing Interview Questions

More often than not, interviews are conducted off the cuff without more than a quick glance at a resume and a few minutes of preparation. This can result in gathering insufficient information necessary to make an important hiring decision.

When preparing for interviews, take time to formulate questions that will help you evaluate and/or compare candidates. Investing just 30 minutes in the following preparatory steps will produce a more thorough and revealing set of questions.

1. Review initial priorities, experience, and attributes required for the position and label as either technical/knowledge skills (hard skills), or performance/work habit/life experience skills (soft skills). This will serve as an outline for your interview questions and provide you with standards of measurement when you conduct your assessment of the candidate.
2. Create questions that will probe past behavior around a specific skill. The logic is that past performance predicts future performance. Behavioral questions begin with phrases such as "Tell me about a time when . . ." or "Describe a situation where …"
3. Communication, Leadership, Teamwork, Vision/Strategy are examples of soft skills. For leadership, try this sample question, "Tell me about a time when you had to motivate your employees for better results." A follow up question could be "Looking back, what would you have done differently"; see below for additional behavioral questions.
4. If there are several interviewers, suggest splitting up the identified skills and have each interviewer concentrate on one to two skills. This will avoid duplicate questions and make the interview sessions more efficient.

Need more help developing a custom interview guide and process for your organization? Contact us at KL Kingsley today.

In Our Next Issue…

How to conduct an interview and get the candidate to respond? We'll share some helpful tips to guide you through a productive interview process.

What’s Your Top Interviewing Challenge?

Tell us about your organization’s most difficult interviewing challenge – you could receive a complimentary 1-hour coaching session with Kate Kingsley for someone on your team. Email your challenge to kate@klkingsley.com.

Additional Interview Questions

Communication
Provide examples on how you communicate up, down and across your organization.

Conflict Management & Teamwork
Describe a situation when you led a team to achieve a specific goal and there was discord or resistance among team members. What did you do to overcome this resistance? What was the outcome?

Decision Making & Problem Solving
Tell me about how you solved a problem using a systematic approach.

Leadership
Provide an example of how you helped develop and empower an individual or team of people to improve customer service.

Vision/Strategy
Look ahead 1-2 years and talk about emerging issues affecting the industry or your function. How would you begin to prepare an organization for those changes?

Need more help developing interview questions for your next interview? Contact us at KL Kingsley and we would be happy to provide guidance.