Top Video Interviewing Questions to Hire Better Employees

Are you at a race to hire the best employees?

Do you find yourself thinking about some head-scratching questions to ask your candidates when you’re video interviewing them?

Many recruiters nowadays are utilizing video interviews to recruit candidates faster and save significant cost. As video recruiting is now on the rise, there are particular questions that can set the right tone for your video interviews.

Are you ready to find out if your awesome-on-paper candidate is awesome in reality too?

Great!

Let’s get to it and discover the top video interviewing questions that can help you hire better employees!  

“What excites you most about this job?”

This question tends to throw many candidates off guard. Will they say it’s the salary? The location? The atmosphere? Or the career change?

As a talent acquisition specialist or manager, you anticipate to hear a genuine and authentic answer to this question. But you’re also looking for enthusiasm. Getting lukewarm or superficial answers from candidates can be a red flag, especially when it could indicate the candidate considers your company as just one target out of many.

“How would you describe your working style?”

This open-ended question can really help you decide if candidate is a cultural fit and meets the job requirements. This question can also help you check whether the candidate’s working habits can add value to your company or cause conflict.

What’s their working style like? Organized? Supportive? Or integrative? For this question, it might be useful to ask your candidates hypothetical work scenarios. This way, you can discover how they approach problems with their designated work style.

“If you were building a team of former co-workers, who would you recruit and why?”

One of the best ways to know your candidates better, is to learn more about how they see other people. This video interviewing question can help you get a good peak at your candidate’s previous work relationships. As a result, you’ll get to see what qualities your candidates value in other people, and how they might see their future teammates. When candidates aren’t able to answer this question, it could insinuate that they don’t have the right skill sets to evaluate their coworkers’ performance or they weren’t able to foster great working relationships in the past.

“How would you spend your time if you didn’t have to work?”

While it’s great to ask serious questions in a video interview, it’s also nice to break the ice and get to learn more about your candidates’ interests. Do they like yoga? Sky-diving? Playing football? Sometimes you can get to know a lot about your candidates from their hobbies alone. Such as whether they are calm by nature, enjoy taking risks, or like to spend quality time on their own.

“What’s the toughest problem you encountered and how were you able to solve it?”

This video interviewing question gives candidates the opportunity to exhibit their problem solving skills and lateral thinking to the recruiter. From this question, you can get to see how honest and truthful your candidates really are, especially when recalling a tough incident they once faced. Also, when candidates begin telling their story, it will be useful to dig deeper and ask for more details. Specific details, actions and minute information can help you grasp a better idea about your candidate’s character and their problem solving skills.

“How would you resolve a conflict with a team member?”

It’s normal for tension and conflicts to arise amongst team members at the workplace. At the end of the day, everyone has different opinions and perspectives. This question can help you as a recruiter determine whether the candidates resolve conflicts in a petty or professional manner. Do they hold grudges? Do they ask people to step in? The answers to this video interviewing question will shed some great light as to how your candidates handle conflicts at work.

“What is one skill would you like to improve?”

Consider this question as a spin off for the “What is your weakness?” question. By rephrasing it in this context, candidates will get the chance to add some positivity to this question. From the candidate’s answer you will see how keen your candidates are to work on their skills. You will also be able to spot the candidates that have given serious thought to improve their skills in the future at the workplace.

Final thoughts

To make sure your video interview is a successful experience, you’re going to have to ask questions that probe further into the candidate’s character. Of course, it would be even more optimal to choose both: cut-to-the-chase and deep dive interview questions when video interviewing candidates. This way, you’ll get all the valuable insights you need to decide whether or not to move the candidates forward in the hiring process.

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