Job Interview Questions: Download Our Free Questionnaire
So imagine you’re looking to employ, and receive several resumes that you sift through before selecting the candidates that you’ll conduct a job interview with. After the interview process, you decide to hire one of the candidates. After only two or three weeks, your new employee decides to quit, or you simply realize he wasn’t the right candidate for the position.
At this point, recruiting time is lost along with all the invested training hours. If this happens frequently enough, it can start taking its toll on your work teams performance which, by extension, affects the company as a whole. It can even perpetuate a cycle of employees resigning under poor working conditions. Why is this happening? How to solve it? Keep reading.
Why the high rate of resignations and dismissals in your company?
If you detect that there’s a high rate of resignations and dismissals in your company, consider that a red flag that something is not working well and needs your immediate attention. Since hiring new staff is an investment of time and resources that shouldn’t be wasted, it’s important to investigate and pinpoint the cause of the high turnover rate.
Example causes of permanent dismissals or resignations
- Unfriendly work environment.
- Absence of bonuses and/or benefits.
- Emotionally toxic work teams.
- Low salary in relation to the work performed.
- Authoritarian and aggressive bosses.
- Lack of clarity with responsibilities.
- Lack of attitude or vocation in the worker.
- Unsafe work environment.
- Failures in the recruitment and selection process.
- Excess work stress.
- Communication issues.
Why is it important to avoid a high turnover rate?
We can sum it all up with a single reason: without employees, your company doesn’t function. In addition, if your current workforce is unmotivated, incompetent, or shorthanded, your company will find itself spinning its wheels, unable to get traction to advance or grow.
The employees are the life of the party. Without the right ones, your business will be stuck in a loop that can jeopardize performance. It’s a difficult problem to solve as it entails not only evaluating the quality of the worker, but also the business leadership. As the head of a business, have you experienced very good employees that always end up walking out on you? Or do you find your business holding on to employees that just arn’t performing their duties? Start with reviewing the leadership and begin to fine-tune your recruitment and selection strategy. Everything has a beginning, and in this case, the beginning is in the selection process.
The origin: the job interview
We know that every recruitment process has stages that precede each other. The design of this process involves knowing the vacancy very well, the budget, and the criteria you need to fill such positions. But each and every one of these stages will always end with the candidate facing you in a job interview.
Common mistakes in a job interview
- Not preparing the job interview in advance.
- Prioritizing academics & experience above human qualities.
- Disregarding emotional intelligence, attitude, skills, learning ability, communication, life habits, family, etc.
- Improvising questions without a prepared outline.
- Not clearly defining the job responsibilities, functions, schedules, and salary.
- Portraying a poor image of the company or one that does not value its workers.
At the interview stage, the important thing is not to learn what the candidate does or does not know, but who the candidate is as a person. That’s not to say that written resumes, degrees, or experience aren’t important, but what’s the point of hiring someone that’s highly educated with experience if they are emotionally unstable, unable to work with others, or a drug addict?
As it is, companies today are more interested in knowing about an individual’s temperament before knowing about their educational or skill related qualifications.
How to conduct a job interview?
If you don’t first establish the temperament that’s needed for the job, then you may end up spending the year receiving resignation letters or firing people. The basis for knowing how to do a job interview is the human aspect of the candidate, not their studies or experience.
In other words: it is the humanity of the candidate that brings true value. Starting with their principles, their attitude, emotional intelligence, and everything else that defines a human is what connects them with your company in a mutually beneficial way. It’s the foundation that education and skills are built upon, otherwise the whole thing crumbles.
How to structure your job interview?
Even before the formulation of questions, give structure to the substance of the issue. Where to start? What do you need to investigate? For what purpose? Are you clear about the profile you need? Let’s look at the following structures:
- Presentation: tell the candidate who you are, what the company is about, what they do, how many years they’ve been operating.
- The vacancy: explain what the company needs, discuss the tasks, responsibilities, functions, salary, incentives, and the work environment.
- Objective inquiry: ask about past work experience, education level, skills, etc.
- Seek to know who the applicant is as a person through subjective inquiry.
Development of the job interview: talk, don’t question
If you need to get to the bottom of things, you don’t need to become a tyrant. With a cordial smile, speak frankly, but kindly. Formulate your questions beforehand, but depending on the nature of the answers, don’t be afraid to branch off a little in order inquire about issues that arise along the way. In other words, take your time if you think the candidate has potential to bring value to your company.
Questions in a job interview: how to write them?
If you want to know what questions to ask for a job interview, you need to know the background, and the background is nothing more than the profile you need to find, the type of candidate who could add value and stay with you. All interview questions should answer your objectives. But what can you ask?
What studies and experience do you have? What is the reason for leaving your last job? These are questions typical for an objective inquiry. Other such questions can involve their current place of residence, time of their graduation, knowledge, abilities, etc.
In a subjective inquiry, you can ask questions such as: Who are you? What is your life project? How do you organize your time? Who do you live with? The idea is to probe the internal aspects of personality, emotional intelligence, creativity, initiative, etc.
Download our free job interview questionnaire form
Need some help getting started? We’ve put together a questionnaire form that’s available for download at this link here. The form contains a series of models and exemplary questions that you could use or adapt to fit your own needs. The form is fully editable and is divided into three dimensions of exploration: social dimension, professional dimension and human dimension. Implementing the questions in the questionnaire is completely up to you, but we do recommend that you at least explore these three dimensions in every job interview:
- Social dimension: explores the social conditions of the candidate, their marital status, family, social relationships. It is important to inquire about the context where you live and the relationships that a future worker has. It is not the same level of responsibility, for example, of a single person than of a married person with small children.
- Professional dimension explores the academic level & training of the candidate. But pay attention: explore if all your academic level has made sense in your life, if there is a vocation, or if you have other skills outside of your academic profile.
- Human Dimension explores the basis of everything, and we believe it is the most important: Who are you? That question is fundamental and perhaps from it, the rest is derived.
What other resources can you use for job interviews?
There are many, but at CazVid, we have verified the usefulness and power of a trending resource: the presentation video or the video resume. For this reason, we highly recommend that candidates send you a personal video presentation or a video resume in addition to their written CV.
When it comes to the screening process of job candidates, watching a video resume can save you a ton of time. Video is capable of providing a fairly objective and subjective window on a candidate’s disposition, verbal communication skills, energy, and overall attitude even before you have an in-person interview. A video resume or presentation on CazVid is also limited to 30 seconds, much less time than what you’d spend reading numerous written resumes.
CazVid is dedicated exclusively to this resume format with which you get to decide your finalists even before interviewing them or reading their resumes. Check it out now to see video resumes and also company job listing videos.
Our desire is for your company to thrive. Having the right questions for a job interview will help you in this regard, as well as viewing personal video presentations.