Asking poor interview questions is a waste of everyone’s time, therefore avoid doing that. At the beginning of your professional life, when you were attending job interviews for the first time, did you ever find yourself wondering whether or not any of the questions that were asked of you were a bit excessive or silly? For example, take into consideration the ageless classic question, “why do you want to work here?” What kind of person would answer that question in a serious manner by being straightforward and simply stating, “I need a job in my profession that pays fairly so that I can pay the bills?” It is possible that you were correct in having such suspicions all those years ago, which is arguably the most startling thing that has happened. It has come to our attention here at webrecruit that an excessive number of recruiters do, in fact, ask questions that do not assist them in selecting the appropriate candidates for their online recruiting efforts. Therefore, keeping this in mind, we would like to provide you with some advice that will help you avoid falling into the same trap of asking questions that are not useful when you welcome a candidate into the interview room in the future. Are candidates being coerced into telling lies? There are occasions when hiring managers successfully force their applicant into a corner by asking questions that are considered to be “difficult” and embarrassing. This leaves the candidate with the impression that they have no choice except to lie instead. Take into consideration, for example, what is going through the head of your applicant when you ask them to tell you about their worst shortcoming. It’s quite unlikely that they would admit to you that they are unmotivated or that they have bad timekeeping skills. Rather than that, they will most likely come up with a “weakness” that also helps to impress themselves, such as “I work too hard,” and you will be left with very little information that is really accurate about them. If there is anything that is even worse than a question that is so uncomfortable that it is counterproductive, it is certainly a question that does not involve anything that you truly need to know about. Neither should your queries be irrelevant or poorly focused. It is possible that some of the most common job interview questions, such as “please provide an example of a time when you worked well as part of a team,” may not be applicable in all situations. For instance, if the position does not require a significant amount of teamwork or coordination with other people, then the interviewer may not be able to use these questions. There isn’t a straightforward “good” or “bad” response to give to certain questions, which isn’t necessarily the worst thing – unless you think there is actually just one good response that a candidate should give. There are a number of questions that do not have a straightforward “good” or “bad” answer. The question “where do you see yourself five years from now?” is an excellent example of this kind of inquiry. The reality is that the majority of individuals have a very limited understanding of what they will be doing in the next five years. This indicates that they may be easily tempted to say something that is excessively ambitious, such as sitting in the same seat as you, or to provide a response that is not particularly descriptive, such as “I simply want to do my best and attain my fullest professional potential.” In the event that you believe that one of these responses is more appealing than the other, it is quite likely that you are not being properly open-minded. However, none of these provides you with a significant amount of genuine insight into the prospect. Is the question so familiar that the applicant just responds with a response that they have practiced? In today’s world, applicants have a tendency to do study on potential interview questions and come up with pre-planned solutions to such questions, which they are able to remember from memory if they are asked. It is obviously not a good idea to merely ask the most apparent interview questions if your objective is to assess your candidate’s ability to think on their feet and provide effective responses to challenging and unanticipated queries. Could you benefit from improving and refining every component of the online recruiting process that your company uses? If this is the case, the first action that you should do is to get in touch with the webrecruit team, which you can do by dialing the number 01392 829 400.