Interview Questions

Hear real evidence of skill in every interview.

A pack of interview questions for hiring managers and interviewers who want real evidence instead of rehearsed answers. Each card is one prompt, mostly asking for a specific past example, grouped by the skill it tests: ownership, collaboration, problem-solving, communication, craft, learning, leadership, and values and judgement. Each suit also includes short work-sample tasks done in the room.

96 questions · 8 suits · 5 recipes · 2 missions

What's inside

Ownership12Does the role need someone who sees things through?
Collaboration12Will this person depend on working with others?
Problem-Solving12Will this person face messy, unclear problems?
Communication12Will this person need to explain, persuade or listen?
Craft12Do you need to see the quality of their work?
Learning12Will the role change faster than its job description?
Leadership12Will this person set direction or grow others?
Values and Judgement12Does the role demand honesty under pressure?

Sample questions

Ownership

Tell me about a piece of work you took on when nobody had asked you to. What made you step in?

Collaboration

Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate about how to do something. How was it settled?

Problem-Solving

Tell me about the hardest problem you solved this past year. How did you work out what the real problem was?

Craft

Describe a piece of your work you're proud of. What would you do differently now?

Learning

Tell me about something you had to learn quickly for work. How did you go about it?

Leadership

Tell me about a time you got people to follow a direction when you had no authority over them.

Recipes

Career-Changer Loop: Assess potential and learning in a candidate new to the field.
First-Time Manager Loop: Assess someone stepping up to lead people for the first time.
Senior Leader Loop: Assess a head of function or a leader of leaders.
Specialist Loop: Assess a hands-on specialist across two interviews and a work sample.
Thirty-Minute Screen: Screen a candidate across the core competencies in half an hour.

Missions

Build a question set for one role: from a role scorecard to eight to twelve prompts, each mapped to a must-have competency, with a scoring anchor per prompt and a rule for who asks what.
Calibrate an interview panel: from interviewers asking their own favourite questions to a panel that asks the same prompts, scores the same practice answers within one point of each other and has refreshed the over-used prompts.

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