What kind of questions do you expect from an interview?

Are you going to a recruitment meeting? Have you not participated in any of them for a long time? Do you read about how infantile questions are asked by recruiters? Are you a recruiter and already have your own set of questions? I encourage you to read it. I will tell you what you should expect, and if you are a recruiter, you will find an example of questions that I use in meetings with Candidates.

There are legends about the type of questions:

  • What kind of animal would you like to be and why?
  • What color do you prefer red or blue and why?
  • What would you do if you won a million?

Well, let’s be honest, you can find a recruiter who has such questions in his portfolio, but it will not be a professional recruiter and I also say that asking such questions does not seem to be much. Once, in a discussion with such a recruiter asking questions about colors, I asked about the reason for asking such questions. He said that this way he examines the Candidate’s resistance to stress.  I know at least a few other ways to investigate stress responses, not to mention that the interview itself is already a stressful situation, especially for people who are highly motivated to change jobs and who want a new challenge.

An interview is a diagnostic conversation. It diagnoses your competences that will allow you to perform tasks on a given position and examines your motivation to change jobs, employment in a new place.  It diagnoses what may be factors of dissatisfaction and discouragement to work or what disqualifies you despite your willingness as a Candidate. In order to be just such a conversation, the recruiter should ask questions that aim at obtaining information about your experience related to the performance of tasks, e.g. Please tell me how the process of performing this task looked like in your company, who and for what stages was responsible, what was the result of this work? He will probably ask you what you did in a crisis situation, what is your role in the team (if you work actively in it), what is your specific responsibility, how to solve operational problems, what procedures your company does not have and in your opinion should have? You will be asked about the ways of obtaining information, the actions taken and their consequences. It will check your experience, how you set priorities and in what order you talk about your tasks.

As a recruiter with experience I have already learned to capture the moments when the Candidate is lying, not telling the truth, coloring or idealizing himself and his duties. If someone says that everything is always successful at work, there are no weak days, never failed, never felt dissatisfied that he did something or did not do something, he probably lies and unfortunately I do not divine him well in the process of getting a job. There are still a few more symptoms of lying but quiet, I will not betray the whole know-how.

Questions with meaning, my own, of which I am proud (let them fly into the world, in fact, I prefer that recruiters ask my questions even if they stop being unique and forget about “What are your strengths and weaknesses?”)

I always ask Candidates about their business authority (Who is your business authority and why? This is one of the most difficult questions, about 90% of professionally active people have a problem with answering this question, I can also check the reaction to stress when you really do not know what to answer ) and the values on which they base their work. Depending on the answer, I obtain valuable information about Candidate’s code of ethics and a full spectrum of examples of action, because for me, as a recruiter, action and conclusions are more important than declarations. I do not ask the question: What would you do if a difficult situation happened to you? I ask you a question: What kind of difficult situation has happened to you recently? What was the biggest difficulty, how did you solve this problem, what is the effect and what will it translate into?

The guiding principle of targeted selection, according to which I conduct interviews, says that ‘SUBMITTED Behaviour WILL allow you to see SUBMITTED Behaviour in the FUTURE.

I will discuss recruitment and business problems related to personnel selection in March at a major conference for operational managers in Warsaw.

I’ll see you around.