It’s easy enough in an interview to establish a person’s experience, their capabilities, and even immediate things about their personality, such as if they seem warm, confident, mannerly and so on. However there are a whole raft of so called “soft skills”, mostly related to team work, which are hard to explore in an interview, but which can make the difference between hiring a good person and hiring a great one.

How To Explore Soft Skills

One of the most important things you will want to find out is how a person works in a team with others. The killer question here is, “Can you describe an experience that you had working in a team?”

Many people will proceed to tell you how they were part of team of left footed morons, who could not find their collective nether regions if their pants were on fire, and who were amazed and awe struck by the interviewee’s ability to ride in and save the day. This is not what you are looking for by any means. This person might be fabulous, but he or she is not a team worker. They always know they are right, and don’t listen to others.

What you are looking out for is the person who describes how a team approached a particular issue. You want to hear something like, “Our customer service staff were getting a lot of complaints about the time it took to get through to them by phone. So I called a meeting, and asked if they could come up with ideas for how we could answer calls more quickly. Some of the staff noticed that particular kinds of calls were taking a long time because they didn’t have the authority to make small refunds, but had to pass them on to a supervisor. So I asked my manager if we could authorise all staff to make refunds up to $20, and we magically cut our waiting times by 37%”.

A Killer Question

One of my favourite questions is, “Tell me about a time when you needed to ask for help”. Many people will answer this with a blanket, “Can’t remember the last time I needed help” kind of comment. This does not reveal a high level of self-knowledge, or appropriate humility – after all, we all need help from time to time.

The kind of answer you are looking for is one where the interviewee describes a situation where he or she was stumped, reached out to an appropriate person for help, listened to and learned from the solution proffered, and moved on to use the technique they learned to solve future problems.

It’s very hard to get truthful answers in interviews. So many people prepare themselves with boiler plate answers to boiler plate questions. Even the most skilled interviewer can make fairly important recruiting mistakes. However if you explore the two areas outlined above, you are likely to expose hose candidates who are going to make good or bad team workers. It goes without saying that the most brilliant people you will ever recruit are likely to be the worst team workers, so make room for mavericks too.