Professional Interviewers Seek to Find the Best Person for the Job

As a professional interviewer your job is to find the best person suited for the job. How is this accomplished?
By formulating questions to elicit informative and useful responses from your interviewee. The best interviewer is one who ask the right questions. This is a critical part of the hiring process. Skillfully crafted questions will help you make a wise hiring decision.

A key factor to remember is to hire for values, attitude and aptitude first, and skills second. Why? If you interview a person with a great attitude and reasonable aptitude, you can always teach specific skills later. On the other hand it is difficult to change a persons approach to work or rapport with others once he or she is on the job. Design interview questions that will enable you to assess these attributes in your applicants.

One approach to interviewing is to ask open-ended questions. Some examples of open-ended questions are listed below:
What are your greatest assets?
What is your greatest weakness?
What do you hope to gain by working with us?
Why do you think you are the right candidate for this job?
How do you feel we would benefit by hiring you?
Why do you want to work here?
What motivates you?

Another approach to interviewing is to ask the person to describe how he or she actually dealt with a situation or performed a skill in the past. You could ask:
Describe a difficult situation or task you had to deal with?
Give me an example of you performing under stress?
Give me an example of you successfully managing or leading others?
Describe a situation where you had to think outside the box?
Tell me about a problem you solved in a unique way?
Tell me about a time that you went "above and beyond the call of duty" on a job?
Tell me about a time where you had to deal with conflict and how you handled the situation. Were you successful?

The interview process will be somewhat different for each company. However, these well-crafted interview questions will provide you with sufficient information to hire the best candidate for the job. Happy hunting!

Source:
www.bc.edu; www.aafp.org