Crack the interview code by choosing the most effective interview questions to ask candidates in Bristol, bath, weston super mare, nailsea and clevedon......
Hiring the right person is crucial for your team's success. By asking the right questions, you can uncover a candidate's true potential and identify the perfect fit for your business. This comprehensive guide provides a wealth of competency-based interview questions designed to assess key competencies, skills, value alignment and experience.
What is a competency-based interview?
Competency-based interviews focus on a candidate's past behavior as a predictor of future performance. By asking targeted questions about specific situations, you gain insights into their skills, abilities, and decision-making processes.
Why use competency-based interviews?
Predictive power: Past behavior is a strong indicator of future performance.
Fairness and consistency: Provides a structured approach to evaluating candidates.
Clear expectations: Aligns candidate skills with job requirements.
Tips for Successful Interviews:
Active Listening: Pay close attention to candidates' responses.
Take notes & Score: Keep a good record of answers and score Reponses
Open-Ended Questions: Encourage detailed and insightful answers.
Follow-up Questions: Delve deeper into candidate experiences.
Legal Compliance: Avoid discriminatory questions.
50+ Interview questions:
Icebreakers
What inspired you to pursue your current career path?
Can you share a memorable experience from your previous job that had a significant impact on you?
What do you enjoy doing outside of work?
If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?
What is one skill you have always wanted to learn and why?
If you could have any superpower related to your work, what would it be and why?
What's one fun fact about yourself that most people wouldn't know?
Describe a project or accomplishment that you are particularly proud of.
Adaptability
Adjusts to changing environments whilst maintaining effectiveness
Which change of job did you find the most difficult to make?
Tell us about the biggest change that you have had to deal with. How did you cope with it?
Communication
Communicates effectively, listens sensitively, adapts communication to audience and fosters effective communication with others
Verbal
Tell us about a situation where your communication skills made a difference to a situation.
Describe a time when you had to win someone over, who was reluctant or unresponsive.
Describe a situation where you had to explain something complex to a colleague or a client. Which problems did you encounter and how did you deal with them?
What is the worst communication situation that you have experienced?
How do you prepare for an important meeting?
Tell us about a situation when you failed to communicate appropriately.
Demonstrate how you vary your communication approach according to the audience that you are addressing.
Describe a situation when you had to communicate a message to someone, knowing that you were right and that they were wrong and reluctant to accept your point of view.
Listening
Give us an example where your listening skills proved crucial to an outcome.
Tell us about a time when you were asked to summarize complex points.
Tell us about a time when you had trouble remaining focused on your audience. How did you handle this?
What place does empathy play in your work? Give an example where you needed to show empathy.
Describe a situation where you had to deal with an angry customer.
Written
What type of writing have you done? Give examples. What makes you think that you are good at it?
How do you feel writing a report differs from preparing an oral presentation?
What positive and negative feedback have you received about your writing skills? Give an example where one of your reports was criticised.
How do you plan the writing of a report?
Conflict management
Encourages creative tension and differences of opinions. Anticipates and takes steps to prevent counter-productive confrontations. Manages and resolves conflicts and disagreements in a constructive manner.
Tell us about a time when you felt that conflict or differences were a positive driving force in your organisation. How did handle the conflict to optimise its benefit?
Tell us about a time when you had to deal with a conflict within your team.
Tell us about a situation where conflict led to a negative outcome. How did you handle the situation and what did you learn from it?
Give us an example where you were unable to deal with a difficult member of your team.
Creativity and Innovation
Develops new insights into situations; questions conventional approaches; encourages new ideas and innovations; designs and implements new or cutting-edge programs/processes.
Tell us about a project or situation where you felt that the conventional approach would not be suitable. How did you derive and manage a new approach? Which challenges did you face and how did you address them?
Tell us about a situation where you trusted your team to derive a new approach to an old problem. How did you manage the process?
Tell us about a time when you had to convince a senior colleague that change was necessary. What made you think that your new approach would be better suited?
Decisiveness
Makes well-informed, effective, and timely decisions, even when data are limited or solutions produce unpleasant consequences; perceives the impact and implications of decisions.
What big decision did you make recently. How did you go about it?
How did you reach the decision that you wanted to change your job?
Give an example of a time when you had to delay a decision to reflect on the situation.
What is the decision that you have put off the longest? Why?
When is the last time that you have refused to make a decision?
Give us an example of a situation where you had to make a decision without the input of key players, but knowing that these key players would judge you on that decision (i.e. superior unavailable at the time).
Tell us about a time when you had to make a decision without knowledge of the full facts.
Tell us about a situation where you made a decision that involuntarily impacted negatively on others. How did you make that decision and how did you handle its consequences?
Tell us about a decision that you made, which you knew would be unpopular with a group of people. How did you handle the decision-making process and how did you manage expectations?
Tell us about a situation where you made a decision too quickly and got it wrong. Why made you take that decision?
Delegation
Able to make full and best use of subordinate, providing appropriate support.
What type of responsibilities do you delegate? Give examples of projects where you made best use of delegation.
Give an example of a project or task that you felt compelled to complete on your own. What stopped you from delegating?
Give an example of a situation where you reluctantly delegated to a colleague. How did you feel about it?
Give an example where you delegated a task to the wrong person? How did you make that decision at the time, what happened and what did you learn from it?
How do you cope with having to go away from the office for long periods of time (i.e. holidays). Explain how you would delegate responsibilities based on you current situation.
External Awareness
Understands and keeps up-to-date on local, national, and international policies and trends that affect the organization and shape stakeholders' views; is aware of the organisation's impact on the external environment.
Describe through examples drawn from your experience how you measure and take account of the impact of your decisions on external parties.
Give an example where you underestimated the impact of your decisions on stakeholders external to your organisation.
Flexibility
Modifies his or her approach to achieve a goal. Is open to change and new information; rapidly adapts to new information, changing conditions, or unexpected obstacles.
Describe a situation where you had to change your approach half-way through a project or task following new input into the project.
Describe a situation where you started off thinking that your approach was the best, but needed to alter your course during the implementation.
Describe a situation where one of your projects suffered a setback due to an unexpected change in circumstances.
Describe a situation where you were asked to do something that you had never attempted previously.
Give us an example of a situation where your initial approach failed and you had to change tack.
Describe your strongest and your weakest colleagues. How do you cope with such diversity of personalities?
If we gave you a new project to manage, how would you decide how to approach it?
Independence
Acts based on his/her convictions and not systematically the accepted wisdom
When did you depart from the "party line" to accomplish your goal?
Which decisions do you feel able to make on your own and which do you require senior support to make?
Describe a situation where you had a disagreement or an argument with a superior. How did you handle it?
When do you feel that it is justified for you to go against accepted principles or policy?
Which constraints are imposed on you in your current job and how do you deal with these?
When did you make a decision that wasn't yours to make?
Describe a project or situation where you took a project to completion despite important opposition.
When have you gone beyond the limits of your authority in making a decision?
Influencing
Ability to convince others to own expressed point of view, gain agreement and acceptance of plans, activities or products.
Describe a situation where you were able to influence others on an important issue. What approaches or strategies did you use?
Describe a situation where you needed to influence different stakeholders who had different agendas. What approaches or strategies did you use?
Tell us about an idea that you manage to sell to your superior, which represented a challenge.
What is your worst selling experience?
Describe the project or idea that you were most satisfied to sell to your management.
Describe a time where you failed to sell an idea that you knew was the right one.
Integrity
Ability to maintain job related, social, organisational and ethical norms.
When have you had to lie to achieve your aims? Why did you do so? How do you feel you could have achieved the same aim in a different way?
Tell me about a time when you showed integrity and professionalism.
Tell us about a time when someone asked you something that you objected to. How did you handle the situation?
Have you ever been asked to do something illegal, immoral or against your principles? What did you do?
What would you do if your boss asked you to do something illegal?
Tell us about a situation where you had to remind a colleague of the meaning of "integrity".
Leadership
Acts as a role model. Anticipates and plans for change. Communicates a vision to a team.
Tell us about a situation where you had to get a team to improve its performance. What were the problems and how did you address them?
Describe a situation where you had to drive a team through change. How did you achieve this?
Describe a situation where you needed to inspire a team. What challenges did you meet and how did you achieve your objectives?
Tell us about a situation where you faced reluctance from your team to accept the direction that you were setting.
Describe a project or situation where you had to use different leadership styles to reach your goal.
Tell me about a time when you were less successful as a leader than you would have wanted to be.
Leveraging diversity
Fosters an inclusive workplace where diversity and individual differences are valued and leveraged to achieve the vision and mission of the organisation.
Give an example of a situation or project where a positive outcome depended on the work of people from a wide range of backgrounds and ideas
Tell us about a time when you included someone in your team or a project because you felt they would bring something different to the team.
Organisational Awareness
Demonstrates an understanding of underlying organisational issues
Describe a project where you needed to involve input from other departments. How did you identify that need and how did you ensure buy-in from the appropriate leaders and managers?
Describe a time when you failed to engage at the right level in your organisation. Why did you do that and how did you handle the situation?
Resilience and Tenacity
Deals effectively with pressure; remains optimistic and persistent, even under adversity. Recovers quickly from setbacks. Stays with a problem/line of thinking until a solution is reached or no longer reasonably attainable.
Tell us about a situation where things deteriorate quickly. How did you react to recover from that situation?
Tell us about a project where you achieved success despite the odds being stacked against you. How did you ensure that you pulled through?
Give us an example of a situation where you knew that a project or task would place you under great pressure. How did you plan your approach and remain motivated?
Give us an example of a situation where you worked under pressure.
Under what conditions do you work best and worst?
Which recent project or situation has caused you the most stress? How did you deal with it?
When is the last time that you were upset with yourself?
What makes you frustrated or impatient at work?
What is the biggest challenge that you have faced in your career. How did you overcome it?
Tell us about a time when you successfully pushed one of your ideas despite strong opposition.
Which course or topics have you found most difficult? How did you address the challenge?
Risk-taking
Takes calculated risks, weighing up pros and cons appropriately.
Tell us about risks that you have taken in your professional or personal life. How did you go about making your decision?
What is the biggest risk that you have taken? How did you handle the process?
Describe one of your current or recently completed projects, setting out the risks involved. How did you make decisions? How do you know that you made the correct decisions?
What risks do you see in moving to this new post?
Sensitivity to others/empathy
Aware of other people and environment and own impact on these. Takes into account other peoples’ feelings and needs.
What problems has one of your staff or colleagues brought to you recently? How did you assist them?
Tell us about an unpopular decision that you made recently? What thought-process did you follow before making it? How did your colleagues/clients react and how did you deal with their reaction?
When is that last time that you had an argument with a colleague?
When did you last upset someone?
What steps do you take to understand your colleagues' personalities? Give an example where you found it hard to adjust to one particular colleague.
Teamwork
Contributes fully to the team effort and plays an integral part in the smooth running of teams without necessarily taking the lead.
Describe a situation in which you were a member of team. What did you do to positively contribute to it?
Tell us about a situation where you played an important role in a project as a member of the team (not as a leader).
How do you ensure that every member of the team is allowed to participate?
Give us an example where you worked in a dysfunctional team. Why was it dysfunctional and how did you attempt to change things?
Give an example of a time when you had to deal with a conflict within your team. What did you do to help resolve the situation?
How do you build relationships with other members of your team?
How do you bring difficult colleagues on board? Give us an example where you had to do this.
Wacky / Creative
Spark some fun and imaginative conversations with these wacky interview questions!
If you could create a new animal, what would it be? Describe its appearance and abilities.
If you could invent a new holiday, what would it celebrate and how would people observe it?
Imagine you could talk to trees. What do you think they would say about humans?
If you could have any superpower but only for one day, what would it be and how would you use it?
Design a new type of footwear. What makes it unique and why would people want to wear it?
If you could live in any fictional universe, which one would you choose and why?
Create a new flavor of ice cream. What ingredients would you use and what would you name it?
If you could shrink any object to fit in your pocket, what would it be and why?
Imagine you could swap lives with any animal for a day. Which animal would you choose and what would you do?
If you could redesign the human body, what feature would you add or change?
Invent a new sport. What are the rules and how is it played?
If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be and why?
EXAMPLE OF ROLE SPECIFIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS:
For Software Developers:
Can you describe a challenging bug you encountered and how you resolved it?
What programming languages are you most proficient in, and which ones are you currently learning?
How do you approach testing and debugging your code?
Can you walk me through a recent project you worked on from start to finish?
How do you stay updated with the latest developments in technology and software engineering?
For Marketing Professionals:
Can you share a successful marketing campaign you managed and what made it successful?
How do you measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategies?
What experience do you have with SEO and content marketing?
Describe a time when you had to pivot your marketing strategy. What was the outcome?
How do you handle tight deadlines and multiple projects simultaneously?
For Sales Representatives:
What techniques do you use to identify and qualify leads?
Can you describe a time when you exceeded your sales targets?
How do you handle objections from potential clients?
What CRM software are you familiar with, and how do you use it to manage your sales pipeline?
How do you build and maintain relationships with key clients?
For Project Managers:
Can you describe your approach to project planning and scheduling?
How do you manage changes to project scope and ensure stakeholder alignment?
What project management tools and methodologies are you experienced with?
Describe a project that did not go as planned. How did you handle it?
How do you ensure effective communication within your project team?
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