Personality Report extended to include Interview Questions!

Leo Rolf

Posted 26/11/2019
by Leo Rolf

You can read this
in about 4 minutes.

Personality Report extended to include Interview Questions!

On paper interviewing candidates for an opening in your organisation sounds simple. With a shortlist of potential new recruits ready and waiting, job description and interview questions in hand, you head down to begin the interview process. After a quick-fire round of questions, you’re able to make an informed decision about who to offer the job to. Simple right? If only that were the case!   

Deciding on which interview questions to ask

How many companies spend time carefully considering questions they’re going to ask their candidates to ensure they really discover who they’re interviewing? Thanks to time pressures it’s not surprising that many Hiring Managers just stick to the standard textbook style questions of ‘what’s your greatest achievement?’ or ‘what’s your biggest weakness?’ Organisations must remember that candidates can easily Google ‘interview questions’ where they can find hundreds of results giving them details of the most commonly asked questions. Allowing potential new recruits time to prepare and rehearse answers well ahead of their interview. Therefore, are you getting a true reflection of who they are in the 30 minutes or so you spend with them?   

Curve-ball interview questions

You could go to the other extreme by throwing curve-ball questions into the mix. Using the likes of: ‘Would you rather fight an elephant-sized pigeon or five hundred pigeon-sized elephants?’ Or ‘How would you sell ice cream in Alaska?’ However studies have found that these interview style questions are just as silly as they sound and Google has now phased out using these interview style questions.   

How to single out the best candidate

Unless you ask the right interview questions it can be very difficult to single out the very best candidate. Carefully considered interview questions are key when determining someone’s skills, knowledge, personality and experience. It also presents you with the perfect opportunity to evaluate whether the candidate fits well into your existing teams and values the company’s culture. There are no perfect, one size fits all interview questions that are guaranteed to work every single time for every job position and every company. They may have heaps of experience and a fantastic CV, but here’s the thing: social interactivity, critical reasoning and on-the-spot thinking are integral to any workplace. A lot of these elements you can only find out at the interview stage.   

Have the interview questions chosen for you!

To help organisations really delve into the persona of a candidate, Skillsarena have extended our Character DNA personality report to include interview questions which have been designed to help Hiring Managers explore a candidate’s strengths and developmental areas further. Watch our video about Personality Profiling to find out more. By asking a potential recruit to complete one of these reports, you will understand their personality based on one of four colours: red, yellow, green and blue. These colours have been designed to give you a clear and easy to understand representation of a candidate. For example, someone with a red personality is categorised as confident, determined and focused however on the flip side they can come across as aggressive and intolerant. A recommended interview question will explore the impression they give to others when they first meet. Whereas someone with a green personality is caring and supportive but can be stubborn and indecisive. An interview question will be given to explore their often-slow decision-making process and how this may come across to more extroverted colleagues. To find out more about our Personality tool and interview questions, call +44 (0)203 693 2201 or send an email.

Scroll To Top