Hiring Wisdom: The Best Interview Question, and 3 More Good Ones

Many of our readers shared a version of the following as one of their favorite interview questions: “We are interviewing many people for this position. What are you going to bring to our team that others can’t?”

One reader added this aside: “It drives me nuts when applicants say they are team players and learn quickly. No one ever says anything like –“I’m bossy and a slow learner.”

Here’s an excerpt from my reply: “If you ask a question that gives you a canned answer 90 percent of the time, you may need to look at using a different question.

How about:

“Give me a specific example of how you have excelled as a team player.”
“What was the last thing you had to learn that was out of your comfort zone and how did you apply that new knowledge?”
“Suppose we do hire you and it is four months down the road and I have to call you into my office to talk about something you are not doing the way I feel it should be done. What are we going to be talking about?”

This was originally published on Mel Kleiman’s Humetrics blog.