4 Questions Candidates Need to Answer Before You Hire Them

The hiring process is stressful enough. Now imagine you get all the way through it, and the person you hire turns out to be a dud—they either can’t do the job, won’t do the job or otherwise just aren’t the right fit. Not only have you wasted weeks of time and possibly turned down other good candidates, your confidence in yourself and in the process has taken a hit.  

Unfortunately, mistakes happen and there’s no way to perfectly predict how a person will perform. But there is an additional tool that can give you a huge advantage: pre-hire assessments. There are a range of assessment tools out there, and you may select one or more depending on what traits are most important to the position and your business.  

Here are four questions pre-hire assessments can help you answer during the hiring process:   

1. How does the candidate communicate and approach their work? 

One of the most recognized assessment tools, the DiSC assessment, seeks to explore how people do things. DiSC stands for dominance, influence, steadiness and compliance.  

Candidates are designated by their highest scoring letter:  

2. Why do they do the things they do (or don’t do)? 

Driving Forces, another assessment tool, also measures why candidates do things. It is built around six basic areas of motivation that people experience on any given day. One of the ways it’s been powerful in my business is by identifying people who aren’t motivated by financial rewards.  

It doesn’t matter how high someone’s intrinsic motivation and driving forces are or how great your pay-for-performance plan is if the individual isn’t motivated by money. When someone’s career and their assessment insights are aligned, they are more likely to feel energized, challenged and motivated to do better each day.  

Conversely, they feel disconnected and drained when the job doesn’t match their driving forces, and productivity plummets. 

3. What will impact their productivity? 

We’ve long passed the days where asking a candidate about their weaknesses during an interview will produce any tangible results. So, I love that the assessment report from DiSC provides a look into some of the areas of opportunity for a new hire with its “time wasters” section.  

You can see the top ways a candidate may inadvertently waste time and determine if this is something you can counteract or if it may be a dealbreaker for your company. It also helps set a new hire up for success during onboarding and while setting expectations for the role.  

For example, those high on their I and D scores can make decisions and act quickly, so they thrive when problem solving—so much so that they get stuck in "firefighting" mode and may struggle to transition to a longer-term, problem-solving view. If you see this in their assessment you can ask what they've done to limit their need to jump in and solve problems as they've grown in their career. Their answers will help indicate how aware they are of the issue and if they're taking action. 

4. Will this be a good fit for all parties?  

One of the biggest challenges in making a good hire is getting the intangible “fit” part right. This allows you an insider view into how the candidate is best motivated and managed, as well as their ideal environment. These sections will help you identify and address potential fit, culture and management style issues before you hire the person. It ultimately enables you to have conversations about what a new hire may need to succeed and to conduct some realistic self-examination of what you’re willing and able to provide to set your company and the candidate up for success.  

Most of the benefits described in the post above are from my personal favorite, the Talent Insights platform. Other popular assessment tools include the Strengths Finder, the Kolbe A Index and the Wonderlic.