• Behavioral questions work best for interviews.

When interviewing an applicant, behavioral questions work best. For example, an employer might say, “Tell me about a time when you handled an angry customer” to force candidates to recall a story about a difficult situation they handled.

The interviewer can expand on that and ask additional questions to elicit good information, such as:

• What was the problem?
• What did you do?
• Why did you do that?
• What was the outcome?
• What did you learn from that experience?

It is said that past performance is the best predictor of future performance, so finding out how applicants handled various situations in the past may be a good gauge of how they will perform in the future.

Additionally, interviewers can ask general questions to help determine if a candidate can perform the essential functions of a particular job, such as:

• What kind of job experience do you have?
• What aspects of your current job or previous jobs do you consider most crucial
• Of all the work you’ve done, what have been your biggest successes?
• What would you change about your current job?
• What aspects do you like best about your current job? Least?
• What are you looking for in your next job?