What questions to ask at the interview to the candidate? Recruitment

Employment is the most important stage of life for any person. This is the moment when you start to do something responsible, bring public benefit, take the initiative to organize your destiny, your working day.

For the employer, the device of the next employee is also a certain significant moment, which significantly affects his company and his business as a whole. After all, having made a mistake at this stage, you can cause serious consequences for the entire business. That is why, as we all know, if an employee is required for some kind of significant vacancy, they will talk to him, they will test him and check to determine if he is really suitable.

This article will be devoted to this issue - the selection of personnel, their verification. We describe what a process like finding employees includes and how to deal with it. Also, attention will be paid to some key points that every employer must remember. In addition to general, specific recommendations will be given as to what to do and how to behave with the employee. Including will be discussed what questions to ask at the interview to the candidate and how to evaluate the answers received during this.

How to look for an employee?

Each company needs personnel who will be engaged in its maintenance and to perform tasks arising during the work. Therefore, the selection of personnel is a normal process that is inevitable in any field of activity.

The task facing the leader every time he searches for personnel is to find the employee who is most suitable for a particular vacancy, who could best cope with the assigned tasks. And in fact, employers are guided by some ideas when they select candidates for the position. Although this is not entirely correct.

The best example of how an employer, as a living person, can also do wrong and look for the “wrong” employee, is the following illustration. Imagine that a company is looking for an employee for a specific vacancy. The person who comes to the leader does not like him, although he can perfectly cope with the tasks.

The second applicant, his competitor, seems to the employer more attractive from the point of view of human qualities, but at the same time has a lower qualification and, perhaps, will be worse at doing his job. Which of them do you think will be taken to this position?

That's right, such a search for employees will end in the fact that a less competent employee will get the job. And, unfortunately, nothing can be done about it - the human factor plays an important role in the selection process.

This example, of course, illustrates a situation in which the employer does not do the right thing, both from the point of view of his business, and from the position of some kind of conditional justice. Therefore, we urge you to abandon such a model for evaluating people. The main thing in your employee is not that you like him or that he somehow especially treats you, but how qualitatively he is ready to cope with the work. In order to somehow help employers make a choice, we present to you the selection mechanisms in this article.

Interviewing is the best form of assessment

In fact, nothing is better than the two forms of selection - interviews and testing - (to find employees in your company) have not yet been invented. These are universal tools with which you can get to know a candidate, find out his personal and business qualities, and test his skills. It's just that such a form as testing candidates is not appropriate in all cases, because not all posts require some practical skills.

Sometimes the duties of an employee include more than a set of practical knowledge. Or, on the contrary, there are situations when it is impossible to select personnel exclusively on tests in a particular subject. It all depends on the specification of the work, on what area of ​​activity we are talking about.

Therefore, they came up with an interview as a complementary (or as a single) tool for finding professionals for certain vacancies. With a simple conversation, the employer understands whether he is sitting in front of him a real candidate for the position, ready to start work and deal with it in high quality, or whether this person is not competent enough.

What to expect from the conversation?

In order for a conversation with a potential employee to be successful, you need to know what questions to ask the candidate for an interview. Only in this case, the head of the company will be able to compose for himself an approximate picture of who this person is moving in front of him and what goals. Therefore, we recommend that you work out an assessment mechanism for yourself in advance, come up with questions that will allow you to find out this or that information about a person.

To do this, we will write down what is asked at the interview, and you will analyze this information and decide on your own how to build a conversation with your next job seeker.

Typical questions

In general, we all roughly know what questions to ask at the interview to the candidate. Ask any person about this, and he will not hesitate to answer that these are questions about your hobbies, about your past work, about some personal qualities, about mistakes made and about achievements in life.

In fact, all these questions are typical and most common, they are asked always and everywhere. They help to establish the necessary minimum about your candidate for the vacancy, which will allow you to understand whether it is worth talking with him further. And most often this set is complemented by some non-standard questions, something more original. At the very least, a proper interview should combine both of these types.

Atypical questions

Some of the most non-standard questions include: “Why are you an inadequate person?”, “What kind of animal are you?”, “Why are you - are you?” etc. It’s not difficult to come up with such “tricks”; in fact, you can ask any nonsense; your goal (as an employer asking such a thing) is not to find out what kind of animal is in front of you. It is necessary to understand how the employee reacts to a situation that is not standard for himself and how easy it is to get out of it, how to solve the current problem.

Professional moments

Naturally, speaking about what questions to ask at the interview to the candidate, do not forget about professional qualities (if the position, of course, requires some special knowledge and skills that every person is not endowed with).

In addition to clarifying what this employee worked with and where, what problems he solved and what tasks he dealt with, it is also important to ask something from the professional sphere. Of course, the nature of this part of the interview depends on what area of ​​activity can be discussed.

Question Categories

There is also another classification of what is asked at the interview. These are questions related to certain characteristics of the employee psychology. For example, allowing to establish his motivation, self-confidence, experience, ability to resolve conflicts and so on.

Rather, these questions can be attributed to the “typical” ones described above, since any interview example that you may encounter uses them one way or another. Now we also give a number of approximate options for how you can ask them and what to focus on when you get answers to them.

Motivation

Most often, the employer is interested in what motivates the employee: the desire to work in a particular company, the need to earn money, or the opportunity to work in an interesting field for him. This is the initial idea of ​​a person about work, the factor that determines the quality of his work and what results this employee can achieve. In order to check the real motives of a person, ask him why he needs to work, why he works, why he came to your company, what he expects from work with you, and so on.

Naturally, you should be prepared for the fact that the applicant will respond in such a way that you hear from him what you want. Therefore, psychologists recommend asking questions several times cyclically in order to confuse the interlocutor and not give him the opportunity to think in advance what he will say. If what he said is not true, you will quickly identify this through the inconsistencies that “surfaced” in the conversation.

About myself

It is important not to miss the opportunity to ask the applicant something personal, so you will find out what kind of person is sitting in front of you. In this case, you need questions about a hobby, or something like “tell me about yourself,” or “how do you spend time?”. In most cases, the first thing the applicant will begin to describe is what he does more often, and which pays more attention and time. So you can understand his priorities in life and actually what he lives and is interested in.

Income level

An important issue that should not be overlooked is the question of the expected level of wages. You need to ask how much the employee would like to receive, what level of wages he considers to be the “ceiling” in his field, what level he would like to reach in 5-10 years, and so on.

It is important to understand how this person relates to money and what he expects both from his profession in general and from your company in particular. So you will focus on the approximate requests of this particular employee and you will be able to understand how capable of providing them and how generally he meets the desired in terms of his professional capabilities and business qualities. Ask, not shy, about how much he was paid at the previous job and other “awkward” questions regarding money and income.

Progress

Do not forget to find out the self-esteem of the person who came to you, his attitude to his achievements and the results of his work. Best of all, questions such as: “What did you manage to do at your previous job?”, “What are you proud of in the professional sphere of your life?”, “What is the biggest success of your life in your career” and so on, will help. So you will understand what a person’s value is, what his ideals are at work, what he aspires to.

Reaction

Always pay attention to how the employee responds to all your questions. And the most interesting, in this regard, reaction for you will be the one that comes to your strangest and most unexpected questions. After all, you as an employer should know that at first all people behave the same in interviews. They are nervous, trying to show themselves from the most advantageous side possible, trying to seem better, to please you and get the vacancy of your dreams.

Only gradually do they stop worrying and begin to speak more beautifully and harmoniously. Your task is to bring them out of this balance and make them start to get nervous, annoyed, even angry with you. Only in this way, by provoking a person, you will know what he really thinks and what he is ready for in a real life situation. After all, it is obvious that in real life we ​​are all different, and it is on how such an employee will behave in real “combat” conditions that determines his success at work and, therefore, how useful he will be for your company.

Combination

Combine different types of questions, try to confuse and confuse your interlocutor. At the same time, with the help of your questions, try to cover the widest possible range of his interests, his spheres of life - this will allow you to understand what kind of person you are.

And remember: recruiting is a very important task. Try to give some kind of tests at the interview, provoke a person, test him, this way you will screen out all those who might turn out to be an unsuitable candidate for the position.