There are many questions you can ask to find out more about someone but one of my personal favorites is ‘tell me something about you which is not on your CV’. I am not trying to trip the person up, although there is usually a few seconds pregnant pause with some ‘errs’ and ‘ahhs’ then the light bulb switches on and I get their response. One of my favorite answers was someone telling me that the person who used to baby sit for them when they were very young, had been a sales agent for the toy company in which my candidate was working. Whilst the majority of answers are not work related that doesn’t matter to me, they are revealing, illuminating and can take you down other paths to explore to really get under the skin of your candidate and ultimately that is what I aim to do, to establish if their personality and cultural traits are going to be aligned to those of the hiring company I’m recruiting for, also they help to relax the person and it’s a good way to get them to open up about themselves – we’re not always very good at talking about ourselves, I think it’s an inherently British thing. So next time you’re interviewing someone and want to help put them at ease quickly, if you haven’t thought about asking this question before, give it a whirl, you never know what you might learn.

If you would like further tips and advice on behavioural or technical interview questions or how to use the STAR technique as your interview framework please contact me – Rowena@shoreyconsulting.co.uk

Stay safe!