What Questions To Ask in an Interview and How to Smell a Rat
Now this is an interesting question that got me thinking about how to interview …
I am taking course “Employment Practices” as part of my curriculum requirements for Human Resource Management at a local community college. We are studying about interviews at the present time. We have two resumes with almost the same qualifications and requirements. We have to decide what five criteria are most important and what questions to ask for the position of Chief Executive Officer of a Hospital. Do you have any recommendations or questions that really could distinguish the better candidate.
Apart from doing someone else’s homework, the real question here is how do you sort through the b.s. to really understand how someone thinks and whether they would be a good candidate for a role.
Well the approach i take is to make them work for their interview not just ask them questions. Questions often tell you nothing. People often lie and they are never going to tell you the information you REALLY want to know about them.
So what i do is set them a problem. For sales people i say “sell yourself to me” … if they don’t ask me 100 questions before talking about themselves, then they are not a good sales person. The same can be done for a CEO. Set them a real business problem. Ask them to think strategically about a real life issue a hospital may face and then ask them to solve the problem. How do they approach it? Do they think strategically, shoot from the hip, etc … it is not what they say, but how they approach it.
As they are going, probe various areas – people / leadership etc … ask them how they would do something and see what they say. There are no right answers … just how they approach it.
Finally the other killer question is the one that is “so what questions do you have for me?” … this shows how much they really know and how hard they have thought about it. This uncovers passion / leadership and general smarts. No questions – no job. Crap questions – no job. Dumb questions – no job. Smart, insightful questions – a great start.
So – this is not a simple approach but one that delivers the results.
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