A guide to common interview questions

Conducting an interview is your chance to get to know a job candidate and assess their suitability for a position with your organisation. You will only have a limited amount of time with each candidate, so consider using some of these common questions to get the most out of your interview:

Tell me about yourself

Asking this question early on can be a great way to ease into the interview and help the candidate become comfortable and start to open up and talk about themselves.

This may help you quickly get a sense of who the job candidate is as a person, while also giving you an insight into how they think and how reflective they are.

Good answers will be succinct, yet informative, and relevant to the role they’re applying for. Mentions of transferable skills will help you understand their wider skill set. They may give details that pre-emptively answer questions you intended to ask them (e.g. their strengths, why they’ve applied for the job, etc.). Depending on the nature of their answer, you could also use this as a springboard to ask them further questions about their experience and other things they mention in their answer.

What are your strengths? / What are you skilled at?

Finding out about what a candidate is good at is essential for helping you to make a good hiring decision. Candidates could be a better fit if the strengths they mention suit the position and align with your business/organisation’s values and practices.

If candidates use examples to provide evidence of where they have used their strengths this may make them more credible, and it’s also a good idea to check the validity of each candidate’s claims when you undertake reference checks. If the candidate speaks about their strengths with humility and maturity, this may also be a good sign.

What are your weaknesses?

The usefulness of this question is twofold: Taking note of how candidates respond to this question can be just as useful as what they say.

In an effort to appear as perfect as possible, some interviewees make the mistake of claiming to have no flaws, or to answer with a quality they consider to be good as their weakness. This makes this question good for assessing the candidate’s honesty and self-awareness – better answers will show these qualities. Good answers can be where a candidate identifies a weakness and then talks about how they are making an effort to improve on their weakness.

When the question is well answered, think about whether the candidate’s weaknesses would be a significant barrier to performing well in the role, and consider whether your organisation or leadership could help them manage this or improve in this area.

What do you know about our business? / Why do you want to work with us?

Asking a variation of this question may help you discern which candidates have done their research about your business/organisation and which have applied without thought to work with you.

Candidates who have a genuine interest in working with you will have likely looked into your business/organisation beforehand, better preparing them to point to specific things they like about your business/organisation and be thoughtful in their answer.

Why do you want to apply for this position?

Similar to the previous question, this question may indicate to you which candidates have thoughtfully applied to work with you and considered how they might suit the position.

Asking this question also gives them more of an opportunity to list relevant strengths and skills that could help them perform the tasks of the role well and/or explain why they want to work with your organisation. If they have done their research, this may also demonstrate their organisational skills, willingness, and enthusiasm.

Example-based questions

It can be good to ask candidates to provide examples of experiences they have had where they have demonstrated a certain skill or responded to a situation in a certain way. By providing real-life examples, candidates can offer further evidence to support the validity of their claims (and you may be able to further verify whether certain examples occurred through reference checks).

Examples are also useful to help you assess a candidate’s suitability for a position based on how they have approached certain situations in the past, and how they have reflected on their actions since to consider what they might change about their approach or keep the same. For example, you might ask them to tell you about a time when they used teamwork skills, when they had to overcome a challenge, or had to resolve a conflict they had with someone else.

You can assess these answers using the STAR approach. Have they described a situation? What was their task or responsibility? What action did they take? and What was the result of their action?

Hypothetical questions

Similar to example-based questions, hypothetical questions involve asking a candidate to consider how they might respond to a situation that they might not have yet faced in real life.

Because the candidate has to think about how they would approach a new situation, this question style is great for assessing their problem-solving abilities. You can also ask them about specific situations they might have to face in the position they are applying for.

For example, you might ask them what they would do if they had competing priorities, missed a deadline, or if any important equipment stopped working.

Work preferences

You may have already asked questions about their work preferences during the application process.

However, it can still be helpful to ask about work preferences during the interview itself. They may give different answers in an interview environment, and it’s also useful to ask them other work preference-related questions to further assess their suitability for a role and/or how you could adapt a role to suit their needs and preferences.