We’re onto the fourth lesson about the Personality Profile, and we’re talking about how to generate great interview questions that lead to great hires.

What is the Sample Interview Questions report?

If you’ve ever wondered why someone did great in the interview, but not after you hired them, don’t worry. You’ll love the Sample Interview Questions!

The purpose of this report is to generate conversation starters and interview questions using the personality and trait data from the assessment.

If you scroll down, you see that there aren’t questions for every trait -- that would be a really long report, and not that necessary.

But you do get questions for traits that show up in the Summary Report as extreme or highly situational.

Extreme traits are 1s and 2s, or 8s and 9s on a trait scale. And, highly situational traits have a low confidence factor of 1 or 2 stars.

Why zero in on these traits?

This is where the Personality Profile gets really powerful.

For extreme traits, you need to know if the person has their extreme tendency under control. Are they in control of their indecisiveness, or is it controlling them?

And here’s another one: being super organized is a great asset...until it isn’t.

If someone likes to keep their work organized a certain way, they may not be able to make decisions if their environment is not exactly as they like it. If the job requires working in a bit of chaos sometimes, this could be a challenge.

For situational traits, you want to understand what scenarios might cause the person to behave that way.

If someone is extremely deliberate in their work and likes to follow a plan, what happens if the position calls for acting quickly under rapidly changing circumstances?

The report generates questions around these traits so that during the interview or reference check, you can tease out whether the person can roll with the ups and downs of the job, handle the stress, or generally be a good fit for the role.

Here’s an example:

Leanne, who is applying for a Team Lead position in a software company, scored as Very Introverted on her assessment—a 2.

Since the confidence factor is high (5-stars), you would assume this is an extreme trait for Leanne.

The job requires running a team and interacting with people daily, so you’d want to find out if her introversion would cause a problem for her in that role.

The explanation of how she may behave at work flags you that her extreme introversion may be worth discussing. The suggested questions ask how she would handle a situation in which someone was bothering her, or how she’d handle an event in which she would be expected to lead or take initiative.

Now let’s look at a trait that registers as situational for her.

For Reactive - Proactive, Leanne’s scores cover the full gamut on the 9-point scale. This means she responded to related adjectives very inconsistently in her assessment. The 1-star low confidence factor confirms it.

This isn’t a bad thing. But you should take it as a clue that Leanne responds differently depending on the situation.

The questions here are designed to tease out what those situations might be.

“Would you prefer to react to something known or try to prevent something that might not happen?” is an interesting open-ended question that should spark a conversation about her preferred method of handling a work scenario.

We like to think of the interview questions as conversation starters. They’re phrased to cut past rehearsed responses and encourage thoughtful answers.

If you’ve done lots of interviewing, you know these off-the-cuff remarks are often where the gold lies.

You’re looking for what makes someone tick and how they might respond when challenged.

Even if you don’t use the questions as written, you can still use them to spark your own ideas for questions about your company or industry.

To wrap up, we think better interview questions lead to better hires.

Use the Sample Interview Questions report to spark a conversation that teases out the unique aspects of someone’s personality.

Then, it’s up to you to decide if their “uniqueness” is right for the job or not.

Any questions, contact us or schedule a call.