Questions Avoid during Interviewing

Companies run on the written code of agreements and contracts. However, this tends to deviate many managers towards following the written word a bit too seriously to not see the big picture and what they are missing. Some common wrong practices in recruiting are as follows −

Considering the Resume and Nothing Else

Usually, an interviewer takes the resume and begins asking questions that are related to the information written in the resume. The interviewee then conveys the same data written on the resume’; the manager checks if the candidate actually has the skills as claimed in the resume. thus, making it more of a resume-based trivia rather than an interview. This does not offer a 360-degree interview of the candidate.

To give Away All of the Answers

Another style that managers very usually tend to incorporate is first describing the complications of the position, nature of the workplace, and the work culture of the company to the interviewee.

However, in this case, the interviewee may get the thought that the interviewer expects him/her to match up to the interviewer’s expectations, and will then try twist his skill-sets to fit the manager’s description of the job. This results in the manager later realizing that the interviewee is unable to match up to his/her expectations.

Boring and stereotypical Interview Questions

The following kind of questions are a bit too common and candidates may find them repetitive and regressive in most of the interviews they face −

• Can you introduce yourself?
• How would you benefit the organization?
• What weaknesses do you have that you may try to eliminate?

While these questions help in obtaining some helpful information, they are not going to help with some of the potential and crucial attributes, nor will they necessarily help the managers to get to the behavioral aspects of the interviewee that they are looking for in the ideal candidate.

Behavioral Interviewing

This is where the significance of the term ''Behavioral Interviewing'' comes into play. The main idea behind behavioral style of interviewing is that the kind of performance in the past can easily predict the kind of performance in the future, provided that the circumstances remain same.

Behavioral interviewing digs inside the candidate's decision-making process. This style of interviewing process can result in a significantly greater amount of useful data as compared a traditional interview process.

Here is a set of some sample behavioral interviewing questions −

• Mention an instance when sold an idea internally among your coworkers.
• What was the last time you didn’t agree with your boss, yet sorted the dilemma?
• Convey an instance when you had become creative in order to get the job done.
• Tell me about a situation when you organized a heavy workload efficiently.
• Describe a situation when you failed while trying to achieve something.

Though the interviewees might have undergone some training in order to answer these kind of questions, the main advantage in this kind of process is that the questions are unpredictable, which makes it nearly impossible to practice the answers of all the questions, making the answers very difficult to prepare.

It is also usually noticed that some candidates tend to use a similar sounding answer while answering to different questions as it is within the range of their comfort level. A list of questions covering multiple categories will be very helpful in this type of a situation.

Motivational Questions

Another very important variety of questions are motivational questions. While this style of behavioral interviewing may be useful to identify the motivating factors of a candidate, there are some more specific questions the interviewer can ask as well.

Here is a couple of motivational questions that an interviewer can choose to ask −

• Narrate a situation when your performance exceeded that of your peers.
• Narrate a story, when you made a difference within your company.