Strengthen Your Hiring Process

Fundamentally, we need to evaluate a candidate in the following 2 categories:

• Competence

• Character

Competence​

Aimed at Establishing a person’s skills, abilities and qualifications

Questions to Ask​

These questions are highly job specific and need to be customized as per job requirements. In this regard, we provide you with broad guidelines on what questions to ask based on the skill sets needed for the job

• Can you describe your daily work routine

  This helps you understand if the person meets the role requirement or not. Ask more follow-up questions to understand in depth the role. You will also be able to gather information on the communication ability of the person

• Describe a time when you had to solve a problem, but didn’t have all the necessary information about it in hand. What did you do?

  Helps to understand thinking and problem-solving ability. It gives you an insight into whether the person is a good fit for your organization and their ability to get work done. Please focus to see if the candidate is being verbose, avoiding sharing any key facts or figures.

• What are you good at, but never want to do anymore?

  This is a tough question that lets you understand more about a candidate’s ability to learn new things and ability to change perspective with career growth

• What’s the best way to delegate a task

  An important question is if the candidate will be managing a team of people. Understand their ability to get work done by others

• Why do you want to take a job here? Tell me something other than “We are a great company to work for and the usual rhetoric ”

  Understand the candidate’s ability to focus on small details or not. You can also judge how keen the person is for the job

• You have got 2 mins left to ask me anything you like, what’s it going to be

  Ensures that the candidate asks relevant questions than asking for the sake of asking a question in an interview

• Why do you think someone hates their jobs

  - How will you identify if someone hates their job even if they are a top performer
  - How do you identify a bad fit in your organization

  Gather information on the candidate’s ability to manage a team effectively and whether they can keep the team motivated for high productivity

• Would you sell cigarettes to a smoker even if it was bad for them?

  A trick question to gather more information on candidates’ ability to analyze tough situations and find appropriate solutions

Character​

Aimed to understand a person’s intrinsic values and personality

Typically we are biased to evaluate a person based on their competency rather than their character. However, it’s important to understand that competency can be built by a person with good character but not the other way around. This guide will list down certain questions that you should consider in your arsenal when interviewing candidates

Questions to Ask​

• For the last few companies you’ve been working at, please walk me through:

  - When you left the organisations
  - Why did you leave?
  - When you joined the next one, why did you choose it?

  This Allows you to evaluate whether the candidate is a good fit for your organization or not. If the reasons provided are flimsy, you need to raise further follow-up questions but focus to understand the clear rationale behind every move.

• Is there something that I should know about you, that I won’t be able to gather from your resume

  This is an opportunity for candidates to explain why they are a good fit for the role along with a cultural match

• What is the one part of your previous company’s culture that you hope to bring to your next one? What one part do you hope to not find in the new company?

  Understand in depth what is important to the candidate along with what type of work culture he/she thrives best

• Why do you think we shouldn’t hire you ?

  Alternative to asking about candidate weakness, which is well prepared by most candidates currently

• Do you find it ethical to take a company pen and use it for personal work

  No right answer but helps you gather information on the candidate’s moral compass

Conclusion

We at Knighthood hope this post serves as a guide to aid in your hiring process. We provide customer hiring and staffing services to organisations. In case you are interested to learn more, feel free to connect with us.