How do I put together interview questions?

Hi, I’m Donna. And in case you haven’t come across my cards yet, this is my pack of 52 top tips. They’re designed for business owners, entrepreneurs, managers, who are employing staff to get some top tips, find out a little bit about a lot of different topics and to understand what they don’t know.

So very often as business owner, we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know what questions we need to ask. And these have been designed specifically just to raise awareness when it comes to the people management elements of your role as a business owner, or as a manager. Each of the suites looks at a different element of managing staff and we’re working our way through the diamonds, and today is day eight, and it’s all about questioning during an interview. 

You want candidate to do 80% of the talking. Ask a question and then listen. Use a mixture of open and closed questions. Open questions are one in which the candidate can elaborate. Use how, what, when, why and where. Closed questions are ones which will give you a yes or no answer. Did you like the way something was done? Yes or no. Tell me what you liked about something opens up the question. It gives them a chance to answer. It gives you a chance to see their personality. It gives you a chance to see the way in which they digest information and the way in which they’re able to put together a sentence, put together an answer, and think through. 

Now you need to design your questions very carefully so that they examine the key elements that you want from your interview candidates. And you need to be able to make sure that you ask the same questions of all candidates so that you can compare apples with apples and pears with pears, but actually , the way in which you construct your question is really important.