5 Different Types of Interview Questions to Find the Best Candidates

You’ve created your recruiting strategy and listed your job postings and have started to attract potential candidates. The question now is what kind of questions do you ask during your interviews?  

This is a good question to think about because asking the wrong questions to a candidate during an interview could end you up with the wrong employee for the position that you’re wanting to fill, causing headaches down the line with increased turnover rates and lowering your ROI of hires. 

For this week we wanted to focus on five different types of interview questions that you can ask candidates to fully vet them for their future positions. These interview questions types will allow you to discover different aspects of your candidates and let you understand how they’ll perform in their roles in the company. 

Interview Questions Types 

Credential Verification– These types of questions allow you to understand the credentials of your candidate. Use these questions to verify points on their resume and to see if they can expand on what they’ve listed on it. Think “How long were you at ___?,” or “Where did you go to school?” as examples of this type of question. 

Experience Verification– This type of question allows you to understand the experience that your candidate has for the job. You can subjectively evaluate their experience by asking questions like “What did you learn in this job?,” “How did you perform in this position?,” or “What were your responsibilities in this role?” 

Opinion– These types of questions allow you to understand how your candidate thinks about the world. Asking these questions can give you insight into how they would respond to hypothetical scenarios or how they view a subject. Think “What would you do if ___ happened?,” “What is your greatest strength?,” or “What do you think about ____?”  

Behavioral– It can be difficult to figure out how a candidate might act in the position that they’re put in, but behavioral questions allow you to think about this. The goal of these types of questions is to gauge how a candidate would behave in a situation based on past events. Think “give me a time that you showed ____ behavior?,” “What steps did you take to achieve ___goals?,” or “Tell me a time that you felt ___ in your last job?”   

Brainteasers– Some job positions require specialized knowledge or skill to complete them. Brainteasers can be a great way to find out if your candidates have the skills that they say they do on their resumes. Think giving candidates coding exercises if it’s a coding position, editing and grammar exercises if the job requires a lot of writing, or any other skill that you need to test the candidate on. 

No matter what job position you are trying to fill, asking the right questions is key to finding the best candidates. These interview question types should give you a great starting point to building questions to ask your potential candidates, and ultimately, help you find the right employees for the job.