As an employer, it can be challenging to make sure you are asking the right questions to find the best candidates for your job opportunity. There is so much you want to learn about a candidate that it seems impossible to understand them as a prospective employer by a simple question and answer round. Well, luckily for you, a successful interview is about asking the right questions so that you, as an employer, get a chance to see the real candidate underneath the marketing and self-promotion inherent in the interview process. Here are some of the must-ask questions you should be asking your tech candidates for higher chances of hiring success.
1. How Do You Maintain Quality in Your Work?
In interviews, candidates are often asked how they maintain quality without constant monitoring. In your candidate’s response to this question, look for discussion of implementing with confidence, while at the same time focusing on continuous improvement, attention to detail, and consolidation and efficiency when necessary. Feedback is also a key component of effective interactions around building quality products.
2. Describe your previous roles and what you have learned from them?
Lessons learned from previous roles are so crucial to any career, and those lessons weigh heavily into the overall expectations of them at the stage they are currently at. If they are not able or willing to discuss those learning opportunities in an interview setting, it is worth asking whether they have learned anything at all. This question opens the door for you to learn more about the challenges they have faced up to this point in their career. It also will provide insight on how they have grown from those challenges.
3. How do you handle feedback?
Feedback is a gift, whether it’s from customer complaints or collaboration with a colleague. Their response to and handling of that feedback should always be with the focus on improving the product and providing high-quality service. Nothing and no one is perfect. Everyone can learn something from the feedback they receive. But it takes a true professional to know how to filter that feedback positively and productively.
4. What soft skills do you bring to your role?
Soft skills often get lost in the shadow of technical skills within an engineering context, but as an employer, you want to make sure you hire staff with a well-rounded and dependable set of so-called soft skills. These skills include interpersonal skills, communication, the ability to meet deadlines, promptness, and professionalism, as well as leadership, creativity, teamwork, and self-motivation skills. A recent study showed that employers consider these soft skills to be at or near the top of their wish lists for new employees. This is because all the technical skills in the world can’t make up for lack of ability within a team environment.
5. What would you do in this scenario?
Providing a hypothetical scenario for a candidate to respond to is a great way to see their thought process in action. You learn almost as much about a prospective employee through their walking you through their thinking in a scenario as you would in a real-world situation. The added pressure of an interview setting helps to simulate a tense work situation, and their emotional response is as telling as their answers might be.
Inventing a hypothetical scenario to share with a candidate can be difficult to come up with on the spot, so make sure you have at least one or two prepared for the interview. For inspiration, look back over your experience and describe a scenario which you responded to. The added hindsight will help you evaluate the effectiveness of the candidate’s solution as well as give you the confidence you need to challenge their assumptions.
Be Ready for Your Next Interview
To ensure that you are prepared for your next tech interview, be sure to consult with our team at ESGI!
