Improving your screening process: 3 types of questions to ask your candidates!
Jaime Ramos
It’s undeniable that when it comes to hiring, one of the most important steps in your screening process is to ask your candidates the right questions. This will help you better understand your candidate’s technical and social skills and, mainly, if they fit in with your company’s culture and position requirements. In this blog post, learn about the 3 types of questions you can use to qualify your candidates:
đŸ’¡Soft Skills
- What are Soft Skills?
Soft skills refers to a set of skills that are very important for success in the workplace and that can be easily applied in different scenarios, industries and positions. These include: common sense, interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, character traits as well as communication skills. Soft skills either can’t be acquired or are difficult to learn through traditional education.
Identifying a candidate’s soft skills has become increasingly relevant in hiring processes today. That’s because, when it comes to building a successful career path, in the long run, social skills end up outweighing hard skills – or technical skills. By evaluating soft skills, recruiters can understand the strengths and weaknesses a candidate might have when put into specific work-related scenarios and then, better identify if the candidate is right for the position.
đŸ’¡Hard Skills
- What are Hard Skills?
These are objective questions focused on technical skills fit to ask your candidates. These skills should be defined, evaluated and measured. In other words, hard skills are the essential requirements needed for the candidate to succeed in the position. Hard skills are learned through traditional education, certifications, training etc.
Usually hard skills are specific to the role and require additional practice to maintain them up to date. Some of these hard skills include: A degree (or other academic qualification), industry specific certification, coding ability, foreign language skills, computer skills.
đŸ’¡Behavioral Questions
- What are Behavioral questions?
These are questions to ask your candidates that outline how he faces challenges found within the workplace. These questions can be about complex hypothetical situations involving coworkers, customers, leadership team etc. Critical thinking, emotional intelligence, communication skills (amongst others) are all soft skills that when mixed with hypothetical situations, can be analyzed as the candidate’s behavioral attitudes. .
To differentiate behavioral questions from soft skills questions, it is important to pose these questions as hypothetical situations, giving real-life examples of situations that can occur with the candidate. Only then, can you draw a behavioral analysis from your candidate’s answers.
How to create your questions:
Speaking to hiring managers to understand what skills are needed for each position is essential to avoid wasting time with questions that don’t really matter in your interview process!
All questions must be aligned with the unique characteristics of each position , in order to draw a persona that fits the requirements and description of the position.
How can Plooral help you?
With Plooral, your HR team can create unlimited questionnaire templates, unique to each position or department. You may choose to have these templates auto-corrected by our system, or you may review and score candidates yourself. With our templates, you can easily create hard and soft skills assessment tests oradd behavioral questions.
Want to learn more? Click here to talk to our team of specialists.