The questions to ask during an interview as the interviewer matter less than deciding what a good answer should contain. A confident response can still leave ownership unclear, while a hesitant one may contain useful evidence. Start with the role’s requirements, choose questions about past actions and realistic work problems, and define what you’ll listen for before comparing candidates.
TLDR:
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Tie your interview questions to job tasks; ask every candidate the same core questions.
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Ask “What did you personally do?” to separate individual work from team results.
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Use behavioral questions for past actions and situational questions for hypothetical judgment.
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Score evidence independently before debriefing, using weak, acceptable, and strong benchmarks.
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Skip questions about family, age, or health; ask about job tasks and disclosed schedules.
Opening Questions About Relevant Experience
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“Which experience best prepared you for this role?” Listen for connections between past work and the job’s requirements.
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“What did you personally own in your most relevant project?” Separate individual contributions from team results.
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“What interests you about these responsibilities?” Look for an understanding of the duties and which ones appeal to the candidate.
Give concrete examples more weight than polished delivery. Ask for specifics when answers stay vague, a core principle of how to interview candidates at a startup.
Behavioral Interview Questions About Past Performance
| Question | Competency | Listen for |
|---|---|---|
| “Tell me about a difficult goal you achieved.” | Persistence | Obstacles and actions |
| “Describe a mistake and how you handled it.” | Accountability | Repair and prevention |
| “When did you deliver with limited resources?” | Resourcefulness | Tradeoffs and outcomes |
No STAR training is needed. Prompt for context, responsibility, action, and result:
What happened? What was your task? What did you do? What changed?
Accept examples from education, volunteering, or independent projects.
Situational Interview Questions About Judgment
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“How would you handle conflicting requests from stakeholders?”
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“What would you do if you realized a deadline was unrealistic?”
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“How would you approach an assignment with unclear requirements?”
Situational questions test hypothetical reasoning; behavioral questions ask about past actions, a pairing covered in OPM’s structured interview definition. Listen for clarified assumptions, tradeoffs, and decisions about communicating risks or escalating. Assess responses against the role’s authority and responsibilities, allowing for multiple sound approaches.
Skill-Based Questions About the Work
Build questions around tasks the hire will handle:
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Engineering: “How would you diagnose a recurring software error?” Listen for reproducible tests.
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Sales: “How would you qualify a prospect?” Listen for needs and buying authority.
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Customer success: “How would you investigate declining retention?” Listen for segmentation and evidence gathering.
Use brief work discussions or small, fictional samples with consistent instructions, scored with a phone screen scoring rubric for consistency. Limit paid or unpaid work samples to the scheduled interview time, with no additional take-home work; skip trivia, unnecessary unpaid work, and past employers’ confidential material.
Questions About Teamwork and Conflict
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“Tell me about a disagreement with a colleague.”
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“Describe a difficult handoff between teams.”
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“How have you responded to feedback you initially disagreed with?”
“I’m a team player” offers little evidence. Listen for respectful pushback and shared responsibility. Follow up: “What did you do, how did the other person see it, and what was the outcome?” Treat conflict as neutral; assess how the candidate worked through it.
Questions About Work Habits and Prioritization
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“How do you decide what to postpone when priorities compete?”
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“How do you communicate when your work is blocked?”
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“What helps you work effectively with your manager?”
Assess answers against the role’s autonomy, collaboration, and communication requirements. Listen for independent planning or written updates if the job requires them. Keep working-style compatibility tied to observable habits, not personality similarity, constant availability, or an outgoing social style as evidence of commitment. These habits may also influence phone screen to onsite conversion when they form part of the role’s screening criteria.
Questions About Motivation and Professional Growth
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“Which responsibilities would you most like to develop?”
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“Tell me about something you recently learned and applied.”
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“What kind of feedback helps you improve?”
Listen for learning habits and goals the role can realistically support, whether deeper craft expertise, broader assignments, or management experience. The same attentiveness matters during a first-round phone screen. Leave room for evolving plans. Assess motivation through engagement with the actual work, not familiarity with company marketing.
Leadership Questions for Managers and Senior Candidates
For people managers, ask:
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“Tell me about a time you delegated an important decision.” Listen for clear boundaries and ownership.
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“How have you handled underperformance?” Look for coaching and accountability.
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“Describe a decision you changed after hearing team feedback.” Assess the reasoning behind the change.
For senior individual contributors, ask: “How did you gain support for a decision without formal authority?” Assess influence and decision quality without imposing people-management expectations, an evaluation made easier when founders create hiring rubrics in advance.
Follow-Up Questions That Turn General Answers Into Evidence
Vague answers can leave a candidate’s ownership and reasoning unclear. Use neutral follow-up questions without suggesting a preferred response:
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“What did you personally do?”
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“What alternatives did you consider?”
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“How did you know the approach worked?”
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“What would you change now?”
If the answer still sounds general or rehearsed, ask: “Could you walk me through one instance?” Allow thinking time; nervousness or an unfamiliar communication style is not evidence of poor performance. Recognizing this is one of several steps to reduce bias in the interview process.
Questions to Ask at the End of the Interview
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“What relevant experience have we not discussed?”
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“What questions can I answer about the role?”
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“Which responsibilities would you like clarified?”
These prompts let candidates fill evidence gaps and assess whether the opportunity fits their needs. Reserve time to explain next steps and realistic workload or schedule requirements. Treat candidates’ questions as requests for information, not a hidden test of enthusiasm.
Choosing Questions and Assessing Answers Consistently
Tie questions to job requirements; assign competencies across stages. Ask candidates the same core questions, allowing neutral clarification. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s structured interview guidance describes scoring every response against the same rating scale and standards for acceptable answers.
Define weak, acceptable, and strong scorecard responses. Record evidence, separate missing information from weak performance, and score independently before debriefing, following a structured interview scorecard guide.
An ATS keeps interview plans, feedback forms, and candidate notes in one place, but it does not add interviewer time or screening capacity. Teams with a few hires a year often run structured interviews on their own with an ATS. When hiring volume rises, a role is senior or specialized, or no one has room for screening calls, a fractional recruiter or a fractional recruiting agency can work on top of the same ATS. The recruiter runs screens against the same questions and scorecards, and the hiring team sees feedback in the shared pipeline as it comes in.
Sackett and colleagues revisit selection research validity estimates, analyzing how range-restriction corrections affect estimates of how well selection methods predict job performance.
Interview Questions to Avoid and Job-Relevant Alternatives
| Avoid | Job-relevant alternative |
|---|---|
| Family plans, religion, age | “Can you meet the disclosed schedule?” |
| Disability, medical history, unrelated personal details | “How would you perform this role’s core tasks?” |
| Brainteasers, personality gimmicks | Discuss a realistic work problem. |
The EEOC identifies federal age-discrimination protection for people 40 or older; younger candidates may have state or local protections. Before a conditional offer, the EEOC’s pre-employment disability inquiry guidance says employers generally cannot ask disability-related questions, though they may ask whether an applicant will need an accommodation to perform a specific job duty. Rules vary by jurisdiction and hiring stage, which is part of why teams consult a complete interviewing guide before formalizing policy. Seek local legal review for salary history, background checks, and accommodation conversations.
How Dover Supports Structured Interviewing
Dover’s free ATS for startups offers customizable interview plans on both the Free and Premium plans, plus interview feedback forms that are limited in number on Free and unlimited on Premium. AI question drafts need human review before use.
Dover also pairs the ATS with a marketplace of fractional recruiters who work inside the same system, so the software handles the pipeline and the recruiter supplies the screening hours. That same system is the layer fractional recruiting agencies are built on, and each recruiter’s profile carries vetted, real founder reviews that show their track record before anyone is engaged. Recruiters and hiring managers share one pipeline, one set of interview plans, and one set of scorecards, which can reduce duplicate outreach and handoff gaps between separate tools. Fractional recruiters can support screening and scorecard calibration, averaging $4,800 per hire, with rates varying by role seniority and complexity. Access starts with an $800 refundable deposit and involves no long-term contract.
FAQs
What should you include in an interview plan if you only have 30 minutes?
Choose three core questions tied to the role’s most important tasks, leaving room for follow-ups. A practical split is 5 minutes for introductions, 15 minutes for questions and evidence gathering, and 10 minutes for the candidate’s questions and next steps.
Should you use AI-generated interview questions if every candidate has a different resume?
Use resume-based drafts for follow-ups, while keeping the same core questions and scoring criteria for everyone applying to the role. Review each draft for job relevance and fairness; a candidate’s unusual career path should not create a harder interview or a different hiring standard.
How do you handle conflicting interviewer feedback?
Compare the recorded evidence against the agreed scorecard criteria before discussing an overall hiring recommendation. Ask each interviewer to connect their rating to a specific answer or observed action; if the disagreement reflects missing evidence, a focused follow-up may be more useful than averaging scores.
Do you need a recruiter if you already use an ATS for structured interviews?
An ATS organizes interview plans, feedback, and candidate stages, but it does not run screening calls or supply interviewer time. Teams hiring a handful of roles a year often manage with an ATS alone. Fractional recruiting typically fits teams making roughly 5 to 50 hires a year, or sooner for senior and specialized searches, and a full-time recruiter often becomes worth the cost at roughly 15 to 20 hires a year. Fractional recruiters can work in a team’s existing ATS, and some setups pair a free ATS with on-demand fractional recruiters in one shared system, so the recruiter’s screening notes and scores sit beside the hiring team’s feedback instead of in a separate tracker.
Final Thoughts on Choosing Interview Questions, Scoring Evidence, and Keeping the Process Consistent
The questions to ask during an interview as the interviewer work best when the answers they produce can be compared against criteria set before the first conversation. Behavioral and situational prompts, skill-based discussions, and neutral follow-ups all give candidates room to show what they actually did, and a shared scorecard keeps that evidence from being weighed by polish or familiarity. Teams with a few hires a year often run this process well on their own, while higher hiring volume or senior searches tend to call for more screening capacity than a hiring manager’s calendar allows. Dover’s free ATS is built with interview plans and feedback forms as core features, and its fractional recruiters can run screens against the same questions and scorecards inside that shared pipeline, though the right setup depends on how many roles a team is filling and how much interviewer time it has.
