Too often, we focus job interviews on the key skills we want right now, not the qualities we’ll need our workers to exhibit for the long haul. Here are some of those key growth qualities and how to look for them in interviews.

• Initiative and follow-through. Ask questions about important projects the applicant has completed – even if they’re not related to the sort of tasks your team handles. Ask applicants to describe the challenges they faced and how they overcame them. This will give you a sense not only of how applicants cope, but of what they perceive as "challenges" that might interfere with their initiative.

• Flexibility. Ask applicants to describe major changes in their professional lives and how they responded to them. Did they find it easy to remain effective, or was it a struggle? As with the questions about initiative, your intent here is to figure out what applicants think are "major changes," as well as to assess their flexibility. Also ask them if some of these where changes they didn’t agree with, and if so, why.

• Teamwork. Inquire carefully about applicants’ relationships with past or current co-workers. Make clear that you aren’t interested in any activities outside the workplace. What you want to find out is whether they see fellow team members as being cooperative, interested in their opinions, and willing to credit the applicant for a job well done. The applicants’ answers should let you know if they typically see co-workers as being team players – which means they’ll be more likely to want to be team players themselves.

• Business sense. Ask applicants to describe how their past employers met their business objectives. Who were their customers? What market segments did they target? What were the important features of their products? And, most importantly, how did their work affect the organization’s results? Naturally, if you’re interviewing applicants from your competitors, be careful about soliciting too many details. Your intent is to gauge how well an applicant understands business in general.

• Creativity and problem solving. Give applicants a hypothetical situation that relates to your workplace. Don’t make it a common situation, but rather something that could happen. And don’t make the problem that you’re describing too obvious because one of the things you want to ask the applicant to do is define the problem. Then ask for solutions, preferably ones that the applicant, if in this situation, could implement independently. Pay no attention to whether the suggestions conform to your procedures.

• Self-development. Ask applicants to identify something they’ve learned in the last week. Look for applicants who don’t have a lot of trouble answering this simple question. Then inquire into how they learned this thing – by reading, watching TV, talking with friends, or whatever. This can give you clues into an applicant’s preferred learning style. Then ask about the last time the applicant deliberately sought to learn. What was the subject and how did the applicant do it?

You may not be able to ask all of these questions in every interview. But even your preliminary interviews should focus on a least one or two qualities you think are most essential. Once you get to second or third interviews, it’s worth your while to spend time looking for the traits that can produce long-term success on your team. 

Source: Managing People at Work – October 15, 1999

Probe For ‘Soft’ Skills During Interviews 

Determining whether an applicant possesses "soft skills" – like a good work ethic, personal accountability and resourcefulness – is an inexact science. To help you sharpen your focus, here are six questions to ask:

1. "A supervisor assigns you three tasks that you view as equally important. How do you decide which to do first?"
2. "Your deadline is 60 minutes away, and you suddenly realize that you will not finish in time. What do you do?"
3. "A supervisor assigns a task that you’ve never done before and provides no instructions. What do you do?"
4. "You will receive evaluations on a regular basis. What are the three things for which you want to receive the highest ratings?"
5. "Describe the worst disagreement you ever had. How did you resolve it?
6. "What motivates you in work and in personal interests?"

Source: Success in Recruiting and Retaining, April 2002

Bad Interviews Cast Long Shadows 

Consider this: 80% of 500 job seekers polled say they’ve endured bad interviews. Of those, 84% said it negatively affected their perception of the company as a whole, and for a long time. They remembered that bad interview for an average of 6.3 years. Nine out of 10 told a least one colleague or friend about the experience, and nearly a third told as many as a half-dozen others.

Source: Tarzian Search Consultants Inc., Chicago.