Being an interviewer! what to ask?

I’m going to have my first experience on the other side of the table…woudl appreciate if anyone can suggest some “interesting questions”, not brain teaser or the like but questions that reveal good insight to what the person is like…

any feedback is welcome…

What is the job about? The only advice I have is to keep it relevant.

  1. CFA vs. MBA?

  2. Explain a time when a project/team/coworker/you/your laptop/your 12C/ failed. What happened and how did you resolve the issue?

  3. What inspires you? What’s the fire in your belly?

  4. Why do you want this job at this firm?

  5. Pick a task at work you need to do today and say, “After this I need to do some M n’ A in’ on buyside DCF analysis. Explain how familiar you are with a task such as that and how would you proceed with my pending item?”

  6. If it’s a hot chick, ask, “Imagine you are on your way to work for an important meeting. You get a flat tire, how do you resolve the issue? When you get to work, as your preparing for the meeting, your b/f texts you as your typing an email regarding the meeting agenda, what do you do?” Who cares what she says, wait for, “Well, I don’t have a b/f, but…” Money.

Now you know why people ask dumb questions like “what is your biggest weakness.” The answer is that they actually have no idea what else to ask.

If you want to mess with them, ask “what is your favorite color?” Then ask “prove that that color is better than other colors.”

But seriously, you’re trying to evaluate three things: “are they capable of the job” (skills/experience), “will they be happy in the job” (motivation), and “will you enjoy or hate having them as a coworker” (personality/fit). So let those be the guidelines to the questions.

From my experience, more experienced interviewers tend to just talk about random stuff. They can more or less determine your intelligence from your resume, so they want to know if you have a good personality. The less experienced interviewers are not comfortable doing this, so they ask more technical questions.

But anyway, I would suggest that you take something on the person’s resume as a starting point, and then see if you can have a conversation that expands from there. The reason is that if you ask a random unrelated question, the candidate’s ability to answer the question will also be random, since some candidates will just be familiar with that topic by chance, and others won’t. If you start by talking about something that the candidate is familiar with, you will get more creative responses. Also, you will be able to tell if they are just stuffing the resume, or if they actually did all that stuff.

Also, please don’t ask something completely random, like “what kind of animal are you?”. 10/10 times it just comes across as weird…

I’mg heading down ohai and bchad’s path but tempted with the last question CFAvsMBA raise…

We’re looking for some junior burger to update spreadsheet i.e. data entry and…umm…that’s pretty much it. I think anyone with a degree [or without] is capble of doing it.

I’m looking for ways to test how willing they are to learn because both my boss and I can teach but only if they ask…we’re not the type to sit down with him/her and go through things step by step…

I’m thinking to ask questions along the line of “how do you organise large flow of information, how do you distill it and pick up useful info”…or along the line.

why not assign them a small project and see how they do. Make that their interview.

Great idea, I did ask them to complete a spreadsheet exercise plus brush it up for presentation.

I think that’ll do…I’ll leave the rest to my boss.

Ask this:

I toss 2 fair coins, and only I can see them land.

I tell you, one is heads. What is the probability that the other is heads?

Is that one of the brain teaser??..

Actually, my uncle met my aunt in a manner that is similar to what CFAvsMBA described…