Question Craft in a Job Interview
Launch library · evergreen read
A job interview question is really doing two things at once: gathering information, and signalling to the candidate what the organisation actually values, whether or not the interviewer intends that second effect deliberately.
Vague, generic questions tend to produce vague, rehearsed answers that reveal very little about how someone would actually perform in the role. Specific, scenario based questions tend to surface far more useful and honest detail instead.
The best interview questions also give a candidate room to demonstrate judgement rather than simply recite an achievement, asking how they would approach a situation rather than only what they have already done in the past.
Interviewers who prepare a small set of these scenario based questions in advance, rather than improvising entirely on the day, tend to compare candidates far more fairly, since every applicant is then responding to a genuinely comparable prompt rather than a different, looser conversation each time.