How to Bullsh*t-Proof Your Interview Questions

Quick takeaways from my latest webinar on how to write interview questions that work

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Last month, I hosted a free webinar about how to ask interview questions that actually work. (i.e., Questions that help you hire highly qualified candidates who will do great work and add value to your team.) One of the topics that resonated most with participants: how to bullsh*t-proof your interview questions. Here’s what I taught them:

The problem we’re solving for:

Have you ever hired someone who did great in your interview process, but then didn’t have the impact you hoped for once they started working with you? 

I see clients do this all the time. It’s super common because having the skills to interview well isn’t the strongest indication that someone will have the skills to perform a job well. And yet:

Most interview processes are designed to assess how well candidates interview – not how well they can perform on the job.

One of the most common ways savvy candidates can make you believe they’ll perform well on the job even though they don’t actually have the skills?

By bullsh*tting their way through their responses to your interview questions.

No shade to the bullsh*tters — I’ve been one myself! (I was trained for two years at an Ivy League business school on how to interview well.) But well-written interview questions can stop even the savviest of candidates from getting an offer for a job they don’t actually have the skills to perform well. And as a bonus, they can help highly qualified candidates who have less access to interview prep (through inequitably distributed resources like family connections and higher education) shine through.

Here are my top two tips for asking bullsh*t-proof interview questions:

1: Be specific.

Whether you’re asking about a past experience or a hypothetical scenario, NEVER ask a candidate a general question about how they “usually” do something. Instead, ask them about a particular time they did that thing, or what they’d do in a particular scenario you lay out for them.

Why?

Because general questions are way easier to bullsh*t your way through.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say you need to hire someone with strong interpersonal skills, who’ll contribute to healthy team dynamics.

You might ask, “How do you resolve conflicts with your colleagues at work?” 

But what if instead, you asked, “Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a colleague on your team. How did you navigate it, and what was the end result?”

You’ll have way better results with the second question.

Why? Because the candidate can’t just tell you what the right steps are (the bullsh*t answer). The fact that they know those “right steps” has very little correlation with what their actual conflict resolution skills are. Instead, they have to tell you about things they’ve actually done, which is a much better indicator of how they’ll behave in the future.

2: Use a rubric.

For each interview question you ask a candidate, have a rubric in front of you (that you wrote in advance) that articulates the components of the strongest and weakest possible answers to that question.

Why does this work?

Because one of the core characteristics of a bullsh*t answer is that it lacks specificity. And if you’re looking at a thoughtfully written rubric while you’re listening to a candidate’s interview answer, you’ll notice when you’re not getting the information you need to evaluate the response you’re hearing.

In that way, a thorough rubric is pretty immune to the charm offensive of a savvy interviewer. It’s a safety net reminder about the specifics you need to be hearing to give a high score.

Here’s an example:

Here’s the rubric I’d use for the question I suggested above:

Wondering how I came up with the rubric components? Remember the qualification I’m trying to evaluate for with this question: I want to find a candidate who has strong interpersonal skills and will contribute to healthy team dynamics. My rubric components are therefore based on that qualification.  (Full disclosure: this is actually a modified version of an interview question and rubric I developed with a client for one of their hiring processes. So the rubric components also reflect that organization’s values that are related to their workplace culture. You can edit it to reflect your organization’s values and workplace culture. Just one of the many ways to operationalize workplace values!)

Want to learn more about how to write strong interview questions?

Here are a few ways to dig deeper:

• Register for my self-paced course on effective hiring here.

• Read other blog posts about hiring best practices in the “Hiring & Recruiting” section of my resources page here.

• Want help coming up with a bullshit-proof question to measure a particular qualification for your next interview?  Reach out and I’ll help you figure one out!

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