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A Quick Guide to Picking Your Video Interview Questions

Posted on the Wedge blog

As recruiters or businesses implementing a new video-interviewing platform, picking the questions to ask candidates can be daunting. If you have ever been involved in the interview process, you understand the importance of asking the right questions.

Take Google, for example, they do extensive research to figure out the best questions to ask their candidates to test aptitude and fit. While they will ask the standard, “Tell me about a challenge and how you overcame it?”, that isn’t their bread and butter. Google’s interviews are tough for candidates because they ask direct problem-solving questions. Questions like “You are hosting an event celebrating the opening of a new Google office, how are you going to do it?”

Yes, this isn’t supposed to be easy. Google’s recruiters are trained to filter through answers and find the methods behind how candidates solve problems. But, that’s enough about Google. Our last little tip, if a company of their prestige and reputation has departments for solely figuring out what questions to ask in interviews, you should take your own questions a little more seriously.

To be clear, we’re not suggesting you need to go as deep as Google, but picking the right questions allows you to weed out candidates more successfully and leads to more quality hires.

Cover Multiple Topics & Skills

A lot of the time, companies think that because of the urgency in video-interviews their questions have to be related – this is far from true.

A quality video-interview length is somewhere between three and five questions. These questions do not need to be related to one another and even worse, only focusing on one topic or skill.

For questions that aren’t about the candidate’s background, each question should be asked for a specific purpose. Additionally, each question should be asked with no right answer, but instead with the right process. This means, instead of asking questions that have a specific answer, ask questions to find how the candidates think or work through problems.

Now for questions more closely related to the candidate, you need to ask questions that probe into specific events that closely relate to attributes valuable in the role you are hiring for. This could be asking questions about meeting metric requirements or communication experiences for a sales position. On the more analytical side, ask questions relating to teamwork, or tackling large projects for a software engineering position.

Regardless of your route, it should include questions that focus on multiple areas that relate to the candidate and the open position. Ask questions that are unrelated and even opposites, this gives you the best look into how candidates think, organize, and prepare information.

Ask Questions About Your Company or Position

With the ability to hit a button and apply to jobs, candidates will apply to jobs in which they may not be fully aware of. Meaning, the candidate may just be desperate for a job and not looking for a position at your company. This is a big difference. Candidates who are mass applying don’t care about the position or your company and could directly lead to poor performance if they land the job.

A direct way to find out whether the candidate truly cares is how prepared they are for the interview. Essentially, you need to find out whether or not they know anything about your company or position open.

Ask open-ended questions like, “What do you know about [Company Name]?”, “What do you expect to do in the [Insert Position Name] role?” These questions will quickly tell you whether or not the candidate cared enough to prepare for the video-interview or not.

A Final Thought

This was by no means supposed to be the one-stop-shop to picking interview questions but rather was created to help put a different perspective behind how you ask your interview questions.

With Wedge, you don’t have to worry about picking the right questions. We have a wealth of questions in many different categories that are supposed to make it easier to ask the right questions – not to mention they were filmed in a professional studio.

Don’t worry, our little Wedge pitch is over. We just to help make your hiring process more effective. Stay on the look-out for more hiring-related content.