These
Creative Interview Questions Can Reveal The Ideal Job Candidates
Here's how to use
creative techniques to find the best talent.
We’ve all heard the weird questions that some hiring managers like to use in
interviews.
A recent Accountemps survey
found a that offbeat questions are still alive and well. Some notable questions
include:
·
What kind of animal would you be?
·
If you could have all the ice cream in the world, how many
different flavors would you take to make a sundae and how many toppings would
you pick?
·
Use an ad slogan to describe yourself.
Of course, these types of questions
are meant to get past the well-rehearsed answers to more
traditional questions like, "Tell me about yourself," or "What
are your strengths and weaknesses," says career coach Marie G. McIntyre. But what
are they really telling you about the candidate?
On one hand, the more rigorous
(read: offbeat, in this case) the interview process, the better the chance of
landing a candidate who will stick around.Research by Glassdoor indicates that there's
actually a statistical link between a tough interview process and greater
employee satisfaction in six countries, including the U.S. and Canada.
On the other: "The problem with crazy questions is that
they’re just crazy questions," McIntyre says. But by using strategic
questions and tactics in your interviews, you can get a better sense of who the
candidate really is.
Before you begin crafting questions, McIntyre says it’s important
to know what you’re trying to find out. She points to an attorney she knows who
was so focused on hiring a receptionist who would put his clients at ease that
he forgot to ask about office and administrative skills. His new hire was
"a disaster," she says.
When you’re clear about what you’re trying to find out, you can
use the right types of questions, she says. If you’re trying to see how
creative someone is, or how fast they think on their feet, unexpected, zany
questions might give you some insight. But if you’re trying to gauge the depth
of a candidate’s experience, you might ask more personalized questions about
the candidate’s experience; e.g., tell me about a time you had do something you
disliked—and then ask probing questions to get more detail.
Instead of going for the more
outrageous questions, try tinkering with a more traditional inquiry and
personalizing it so that it relates to the job, says employee retention expert Jeff Kortes. If you’re looking for someone
with leadership skills to take charge of a team, don’t say, "Tell me about
your leadership style," he says. That’s just going to get a pat answer.
Instead, try something like, "Tell me about a boss you had who you admire
and why."
"That will tell me how they like to be led, or how they
lead," he says.
When McIntyre was the human resources director for a tech company,
engineers would try to outsmart candidates by asking them increasingly
difficult engineering questions. "Their goal became not to learn as much
about the applicant as possible, but to see if they could trip them up with
tricky engineering questions," she says. That’s not the point of the
interview, she says, and it could end up alienating good candidates.
At industrial design firm PENSA, cofounder and
partner Kathy Larchian says it’s the stories that matter to her. She asks
questions designed to get people sharing anecdotes and memories so that she can
get a better sense of who they are, what matters to them, and how they interact
with other people, she says. Some of the inquiries she uses include:
·
Tell me about a time a colleague gave you advice and what you did.
·
Tell me about times you "managed up"—managed your bosses
and their bosses?
·
If I asked you to do something you didn’t agree with, how would
you handle that?
"You can observe a great deal through their response. You can
see their attitude in the way they tell the story. You can see the things that
make them uncomfortable when you ask the question," she says.
Dave Collins is an actor and coach
whose company Oak and Reeds trains
employees in improvisation—"improv"—techniques as a way of building
soft skills and being better active listeners. Improv techniques can also help
the interview process.
Brainstorm the questions you need to ask to get the information
you need about the candidate beforehand. Have those ready, but also be prepared
to go off-script if the opportunity arises. Collins uses a
"question-asking funnel," where the interview starts with very broad
questions, then more specific, probing questions are used as various lines of
discussion develop. The key is to keep the conversation fluid, listen intently,
and to be ready to follow an interesting thread when it emerges, he says.
"What I like to teach in improv is called ‘color and
advance,’" he says. Use an open-ended question to get the color that the
person will share in the story, then use an "advance" question to
drill down into the specific skills about which you need to know.
To gauge whether prospective
employees are the right fit for the job, Keren Kang, CEO of digital marketing agency Native
Commerce employs an unusual hiring strategy that involves food
products. In group interviews, Kang divides the candidates into teams and gives
them bags of dry spaghetti and marshmallows and instructs them to build a
12-inch tower, writing down their plan for doing so.
During the exercise, she asks one person in each group to rotate
to a different team to complete the tower. It’s a fun exercise, and she says it
tells her a great deal about how collaborative candidates are, as well as
whether they can handle the stresses of the job. For example, one candidate was
so flustered after being asked to change roles, he had trouble functioning.
That was a sign that he wasn’t a good fit for the company, where change and
shifting from project to project happen every day, Kang says.
If you’re going to use such exercises or tests, McIntyre cautions,
it’s a good idea to run it by your legal counsel so you’re not inadvertently
creating a biased interview setting or running afoul of federal, state, or
local employment laws.
GWEN MORAN
https://www.fastcompany.com/3064890/work-smart/these-creative-interview-questions-can-reveal-the-ideal-job-candidates?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-daily-newsletter-featured&position=2&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=10252016
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