Use These 5 Types of Interview Questions to Level Up Your Hiring Process

Using different types of interview questions will help you make the right hires for your startup. See our favorite questions to ask across five categories.

5 types of interview questions every interviewer should know

In any job interview, there’s an impulse to cover as much ground as you can, touching on a wide range of topics like previous experience, future aspirations, values, areas for improvement, and standout skills. But in the limited time you have with a candidate, every question comes at the expense of leaving another one unanswered. By assembling a mix of different interview questions types, you can make the most of those precious minutes and dig into whether they're the best fit for the position.

Here are five interview question types to consider:

1. Experience-based interview questions

While this may seem like basic resume probing, this foundation-setting isn’t something to fast-forward through. Experience-based interview questions help you:

• Confirm credentials and competencies.
• Give a candidate the chance to dive deeper into their experience and frame up why it’s relevant to the position. Break the ice at the start, allowing you to establish rapport and defuse interview jitters early on.

Some unique experience-based questions to ask in an interview include:

• For the last few companies you've been at, take me through: When you left, why did you leave? When you joined the next one, why did you choose it?
• What’s something great about your current or previous position? Why?
• Looking back on the last five years, what’s a career highlight?
• What has your typical role on a team been? How might you want that to change?
• What’s the first job you had that's not on your resume, and what did you learn from that experience?

2. Behavioral interview questions

You’re familiar with this one — think of those “Tell me about a time…” questions. While this framing is a bit tired, the intent behind these questions is still worth pursuing. With behavioral interview questions, you can go beyond the bullet points on a resume and platitudes in a cover letter to truly dig into a candidate's motivations, interests, personal traits and teamwork chops.

To get out of your “Tell me about a time” rut as an interviewer, pull from these example interview questions:

• Among the people you've worked with, who do you admire most and why?
• What does your ideal next role look like? What characteristics does it have from a responsibility, team, and company culture perspective? What characteristics does it not have?
• Across all of your employers, who were the best and worst bosses you’ve ever had, specifically? What was the difference?
• When was the last time you changed your mind about something important?
• When working on a team, what's hardest for you?
• What’s one critical piece of feedback you’ve received that was really difficult to hear? Describe why it was difficult and what you did with that information.

3. Situational interview questions

Situational questions may seem similar to behavioral questions, but there’s a subtle, yet meaningful difference. Instead of assessing how someone responded to a situation in the past to probe strengths and weaknesses, this flavor of interview questions is about asking candidates to place themselves in a hypothetical scenario and reason their way through it.

Here are a few examples of situational interview questions:

• Imagine an employee on your team consistently misses their goals. How would you address their underperformance?
• If you had two competing important deadlines, how would you approach prioritizing your tasks?
• What would you do if you strongly disagreed with your manager about an important decision regarding a project you’ve been working on?
• Walk me through how you would approach a conversation with your manager if you were dissatisfied with an aspect of your job.

4. Opinion interview questions

Opinion interview questions encourage candidates to stake out a stance and defend their position, showcasing their decision-making chops, industry perspective, and functional point of view.

Here are some examples of opinion questions:

• What could our team be doing differently that could yield 10x improvement?
• What’s the difference between someone who’s great in your role versus someone who’s outstanding?
• What are the three most important characteristics of someone who’d thrive in this role? How would you rank yourself from strongest to least developed among these traits?
• Name a product that you think is exceptionally well-designed – ideally a non-electronic product. Tell me what makes it well-designed.
• What have I not asked you that I should have?

5. Curveball interview questions

Some of the world's largest companies use curveball questions (aka brain teasers) to knock an interviewee off their pat answers and put their problem-solving skills to the test.

A few examples of real-world wild card questions that strike the right balance:

• Imagine it's your one-year work anniversary here. What impact on the business have you made since you were hired?
• If you were to take over as CEO of your current employer tomorrow, and had to increase your company's current rate of growth, what three areas would you invest in?
• Teach me something. It can be anything — a hobby, book, or project — but you have 5 minutes to take me from a beginner to someone who understands what’s most important about the topic.
• How did you prepare for this job interview?
• What have you learned in this conversation?
• How would you improve our interview process?
• Why shouldn’t we hire you?

Our final tip? Don’t forget to leave time for candidates to pose any lingering queries before wrapping up. The questions an applicant asks — or fails to — are some of the most insightful in the interview process.