Writing a good interview questionnaire is important to ensure that you get the information you need. It also gives the interviewee a chance to show you who they are and how well they can communicate with others.
Questions are designed to evaluate a candidate’s skills, personality, and professional experience. Some focus on hard skills, while others test soft skills, like leadership or communication skills.
Checklist for Making a Perfect Questionnaire
Interview questionnaires need to be carefully written in order to be useful for research initiatives. In order to give insightful data for decision-making, a survey has to be well-designed. Some guidelines for building an effective questionnaire:
- Start with a clear purpose. Before you start writing about the interview, you should give some thought to what it is that you want to learn from it. By focusing your query in this manner, you will increase the likelihood of obtaining the answers you need.
- Keep it short and simple. Long, confusing questions may cause the person being interviewed to feel agitated. Make an attempt to ask questions that are direct and get to the point quickly.
- Ask open-ended questions. Open-ended questions elicit replies that are both more in-depth and perceptive than other types of questions, such as yes/no and multiple-choice inquiries.
- Avoid leading questions. You run the risk of the results of your survey being skewed if you use leading questions. When asked questions such, “Do you feel the current president is doing a good job?” one might reasonably anticipate receiving biased responses.
- Test your questions. Before disseminating your questionnaire to the general public, you should first try it out on a select sample of people to ensure that it is straightforward and easy to understand.
If you follow these principles to build an effective questionnaire, you will be able to get the answers you need from the interviews you conduct.
Don’t Depend on the Candidate’s Answers
If you’re relying on the candidate’s answers to determine what questions to ask, you could be missing out on an opportunity to learn more about their personality and communication style.
Answering this question could give you a good idea of how well the candidate thinks on their feet and what they’re looking for in their next role. It also reveals what their priorities are and how they work best with others.
Sales is an industry that requires problem-solving, so it’s essential for interviewers to see how candidates have been creative when they’ve faced challenges in their past. This is a great way to get an insight into a candidate’s skills, and it shows their commitment to learning and growing as a sales professional.
Beware of candidates who say they haven’t failed at their jobs or who blame others for problems in their workplace. These professionals have unrealistic perceptions about their abilities and don’t appreciate the support they need to succeed.
Be Standard
Employing a methodical interview process that is comprised of well-structured questions is one way to reduce the impact of unconscious bias. If you put this plan into action, you will be able to establish a work atmosphere that is friendlier and more diverse.
You will be able to analyze potential applicants in a more objective manner, which will allow the recruitment process to move along more swiftly.
If you prepare a list of fundamental questions to ask during interviews, you will save yourself a lot of time and effort. In addition to this, it will make it easier to recognize warning indications in prospective candidates who are not a good fit for the jobs that are now open.
Creating a sample questionnaire for each position for which you are applying is a straightforward way to standardize the interview questions you will ask. In this way, you will be able to standardize the interviewing process and guarantee that everyone of your interviewers will ask the same critical questions.
