Best Applicant Interview Questions

As you gear up for the new year, you may be looking to expand and bring on new members to your team.
Of course, when you do so, you’re going to have to ask certain questions in order to discover which applicant is the best fit.

It can be challenging to get the information you require, so to help you do so, try adding my two favorite hiring questions to your mix:

1. How much compensation do you need? How much would make you happy?

Some companies wait to talk about compensation until the end of the hiring process, but I think it’s really important to find out early in the interview, before you waste too much time, how much the applicant needs. You see, there’s the level of compensation that a person needs for basic survival, and then there’s the figure that would make the applicant happy. For instance, a person might need $60,000 a year to meet her obligations and she couldn’t consider a position that paid her less than that. But she’d be happy if she were making $85,000.

Now, of course, you want everybody in your company to be happy, but you don't even want to explore how to get there if you’re not even in the ballpark of their need. Imagine going through a long process and then finding out that the applicant needs $250,000 year, and you're not even making that. At that point, all you can say is, “Wow, you know what, I can't even get on the map with what you need, so we’re probably not a fit.” It’s far better to discover that early in the process.

If their need is something that you can meet, then you can negotiate. At our company, we like to have people making their need, and then we have creative ways to get them to their happy place.

2. What are your top three priorities in life?

This is a great question for opening up talking points around some of the more personal topics that you generally wouldn’t ask (or can’t ask) about in an interview, but that can really help you both determine if the position is a good fit.

For instance, if your applicant shares that one of her top three priorities is gaming and she travels to tou
aments every weekend, that brings up the topic that your events happen twice a month on weekends.

Or if your applicant says his top priority is a family obligation that happens every weekend, without being discriminatory, you’re able to bring up the point that your events occur on weekends. This gives your applicant the opportunity to see for himself that the position is not a good fit.