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Virtual interviews are becoming increasingly popular with recruiting teams to screen candidates. They save time for both parties and reduce the time recruiters would otherwise spend scheduling interviews. However, it is crucial to know how to write a virtual interview question before implementing them in your hiring process.
Writing strong virtual interview questions begins with collaborating with hiring managers to identify the most essential traits of the role. Once these traits are identified, you will be able to design your interview questions around them. Mainly, you are looking for questions that will naturally surface those traits in the interview.
That’s why today we’re going to take a look at how to design these questions.
#1 Don’t Go for Generic Questions
One of the most important benefits of virtual interviews is that they save time for both the recruiter and the candidate. That’s why it’s important to not diminish benefit by wasting time on generic questions. As such, when writing your virtual interview questions, focus on the most important questions you need to answer during the screening process.
Questions such as “why are you interested in this job?” don’t tell recruiters much about a candidate’s qualifications or what they will bring to the role. The popularity of this question stems from traditional interview methods where recruiters felt the need the put candidates at ease. However, generic questions serve little purpose in a virtual interview which already accounts for candidate comfort.
Read about how to keep the human touch in asynchronous phone interviews.
#2 Ask About Soft Skills and Hard Skills
Rather than asking these generic questions, focus on the candidate’s soft and hard skills. These are what will separate the best candidates from the adequate.
Hard skills reflect technical expertise and are what the candidate uses in their day-to-day duties. You could think of these as tool-of-the-trade skills. For example, software engineers should be experienced in the coding languages a role demands. Screening interview questions should be designed to quickly test this knowledge.
Again, using software engineers as an example, a hard skill question could be, “tell me about how you go about identifying a bug in your code and what you do when it is identified”
Soft skills, on the other hand, are less tangible. Soft skills relate to a candidate’s emotional intelligence and personal qualities that make them an effective employee. Depending on the position, these qualities could include leadership abilities, skills in communication, or ability to adapt to unusual situations. Roughly 92% of talent professionals believe soft skills are at least equally important as hard skills.
A good question to ask to identify soft skills for any role is, “imagine you’ve encountered a problem in your work you’ve never seen before. How would you go about solving the issue?”
#3 Try and Elicit Keywords
Try and formulate questions to draw out essential keywords from your candidates. You can identify these keywords while defining the essential traits of your ideal candidate.
Qualifi’s AI allows you to identify keywords remarkably faster than a manual review. Our AI will help surface top candidates based on keywords that are important to the role. From there, you can find the best talent faster than your competitors.
For more on improving your virtual interview questions, check our piece on how to keep the human touch in asynchronous phone interviews.
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