Two reasons why a job can rock your socks — either because you love the work you’re doing, or you love the people you work with. (If you love neither, then heck, leave. Life’s too short!) Because the quality of a team can make or break a company’s culture, recruiters are always on the hunt for not only the best talent but genuinely solid people that really fit what the organization’s all about. If you’re responsible for hiring or recruiting on your team, you know just how important it is to ask the right questions in the recruitment process to get a good feel for the candidate’s skills, fit for the role, and personality. A great way to review your applicants is to ask them some pre-screening questions in a recruitment questionnaire.
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Here’s a list of 30 telling questions to ask in your recruitment questionnaire to figure out if a candidate is worth bringing in for an interview or if they’re a complete waste of time. We chose fairly general questions that you can use in just about any industry you're in.
Ask these questions to understand the candidate’s motivations for leaving their current role. These questions will give you insight into what needs aren't being met in their current role be it growth, their scope of duties, or cultural fit.
Ask these questions to learn about what type of work environment sets this person up for success to assess whether your organization delivers on what they’re looking for.
Ask these questions to get a feel for how the candidate wants to grow, what they can contribute to your team, and how equipped they are to handle the challenges of their new role.
Ask these questions to find out how the candidate evaluates themselves in terms of their skills and aptitude.
Ask these non-work-related questions to get a better idea of the candidate’s day-to-day personality.
These questions will help you understand if the candidate meets basic eligibility requirements. They’ll also help you gauge where the candidate is in the hiring process with other companies. If they’re a fit and you find out they’re already entertaining other offers you might want to speed up your decision and pull the trigger!
Before we wrap up, here are a few pointers on using recruitment questionnaires in your hiring process.
Screening questions are great for helping you choose the best candidates to invite to interviews, but the last thing you want to do is scare people off by asking way too many questions. Sending a questionnaire with 50 questions can be extremely daunting to fill out and this might push some good talent away! Although we’ve provided 30 questions for inspiration, we recommend using about 10 questions tops.
There are a couple of different tools you can use to send candidates your digital recruitment questionnaire. When you choose what to go with, make sure you’re mindful of the candidate experience. Make it easy for them!
When using tools like Google Forms and Gravity Forms, your candidates will have to finish the questionnaire all in one go. This means they can’t take breaks to think about their answers and come back to them later. If they exit for any reason, they’ll have to fill in all their answers again — total pain in the a**.
You can also opt for an automation platform that will make things more easy for you. For example, SureTriggers. It can be a great recruiting quiz tool. It can gather candidate replies and trigger automatic actions by connecting with Content Snare. For instance, it can automatically send a confirmation email, alert the recruiting team through WhatsApp or Slack, filter candidates for you using the Filter feature, and even arrange an interview using interview scheduling apps like Calendly and others, depending on the candidate's specified availability. This will greatly enhance and expedite the hiring procedure and reduce effort for both candidates and recruiters.
Shameless plug here, but a reason why you’d want to consider using Content Snare is because it has auto-save features built-in so candidates can have their answers saved and come back to your questionnaire when they’ve thought of that great example they want to impress you with. They can come back and pick up where they left off last.
Another handy little bonus of using Content Snare is that once you send your candidates the questionnaire, the tool will help you by sending your candidates email reminders until they’ve sent in their completed questionnaire. All you have to do is choose the frequency of the reminder emails and Content Snare will take care of it. Not having to send those reminder emails means you get a bit of time back to yourself to enjoy another coffee at your desk or hunt down the next potential candidate to contact!
We hope this post has been a help to you, whether that means giving you inspiration for questions to ask, or considering some software to use.
Have any other killer questions you like to ask candidates in your interviews? Let us know some good ones in the comments!
Content Snare is here to help you in your hiring process. Sign up to access our recruitment questionnaire template and save yourself lots of time prepping your own.
