Best Interview Questions to Ask Candidates
Expert-led question sets across every role and competency. Built for structured hiring.
- 35 guides
- 847 questions
- 20 roles
- 15 competencies
By competency
Assess
Communication Skills in Candidates
Communication skills aren't about sounding intelligent or polished. They're about diagnostic clarity under pressure — whether someone can sense what their audience…
Johnny Campbell
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Assess
Decision Making in Candidates
Decision making isn't about being confident or fast. Watch someone describe a choice they made, and you'll see something else entirely: do…
Johnny Campbell
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Assess
Collaboration in Candidates
Collaboration isn't friendliness. It's not even "working well with others" in the abstract sense. It's the ability to deliver an outcome—a project,…
Johnny Campbell
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Assess
Attention to Detail in Candidates
Attention to detail isn't checking everything - it's knowing which three things would cause real damage if wrong, and being immovable about those…
Johnny Campbell
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Assess
Business Acumen in Candidates
Business acumen isn't knowing your revenue figure - it's explaining why your own work made money or cost it, and reasoning about a trade-off you don't own…
Johnny Campbell
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Assess
Empathy in Candidates
Empathy at work is not warmth — it's accuracy: whether someone can correctly predict how a decision will land on people who aren't in the room…
Johnny Campbell
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Assess
Humility in Candidates
Humility has nothing to do with how modestly someone talks about themselves — it's whether they update their view and say who moved them…
Johnny Campbell
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Assess
Influence and Persuasion in Candidates
Influence is only visible when authority was absent — if a candidate could simply tell someone to do the thing, nothing was tested…
Johnny Campbell
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Assess
Innovation in Candidates
Innovation isn't a creativity vibe. It's not the ability to riff on ideas, redesign a slide deck, or describe yourself as "a…
Johnny Campbell
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Assess
Ownership in Candidates
Ownership lives in the gap between 'that wasn't my remit' and someone quietly fixing a thing nobody assigned to them, before anyone else notices…
Johnny Campbell
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Assess
People Management in Candidates
People management isn't charisma. It's not whether someone says the right things about empowerment or culture. It's whether they run a team…
Johnny Campbell
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Assess
Relationship Building in Candidates
Relationship building is measured by what survives after the transactional reason for it is gone, not by how many people a candidate knows…
Johnny Campbell
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Assess
Service Orientation in Candidates
Service orientation means solving for what the customer actually needs rather than what they asked for — and knowing when to say no…
Johnny Campbell
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Assess
Strategic Thinking in Candidates
Strategic thinking is most visible in what someone chose not to do — the project killed, the market starved, the request declined…
Johnny Campbell
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Assess
Technical Skill in Candidates
A CV tells you which tools someone has been near. It tells you almost nothing about depth — what they can build, diagnose and judge with their own hands…
Johnny Campbell
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Marketing
Hiring a
Marketing Coordinator
You're not hiring a marketer. You're hiring the person who holds marketing together—the one who builds demand gen funnels, manages email sequences,…
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring a
Content Marketing Manager
Most hirers spend their interview time asking about blog posts and email campaigns, then hire someone who can't actually manage the cross-functional…
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring a
Demand Generation Manager
Demand generation managers sit at a peculiar intersection: they own the metrics everyone can see (pipeline, lead volume, cost-per-lead) but rarely own…
Johnny Campbell
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Sales
Hiring a
Sales Development Representative
The Sales Development Representative role is deceptively brutal. It's the entry point to enterprise sales, yet it demands a cocktail of resilience,…
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring a
Sales Director
Most hiring teams assess Sales Directors through the same lens they'd use for an Account Executive—a fundamental error that costs seven-figure mistakes.…
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring an
Account Executive
Account Executive roles are deceptively varied. A £10k ARR SaaS AE closing monthly deals from a warm pipeline is not the same…
Johnny Campbell
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Customer Success
Engineering
Hiring a
DevOps Engineer
DevOps as a job title has become almost meaningless. It stretches from the sysadmin who wrote some Terraform scripts three years ago…
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring a
Senior Software Engineer
The senior IC band is where most hiring loops leak the most signal — and most organisations don't realise it. We've watched…
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring a
Machine Learning Engineer
Machine Learning Engineer is one of the most mis-hired roles of the past five years. Companies design interview loops for research scientists…
Johnny Campbell
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Other roles
Hiring a
Head of Talent
For executive teams hiring the person accountable for workforce planning, budget, exec stakeholder management and scaling the TA function — not another recruiter with a bigger title. Tests operating judgement, not sourcing philosophy.
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring an
HR Director or CHRO
For boards and CEOs hiring an HR Director or CHRO: questions that test board influence, organisation design and hard calls on people and pay — because this hire is usually made on chemistry and fails eighteen months in.
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring an
HR Manager
Every hard call an HR Manager makes gets made before the facts are clear. These 24 questions test casework judgement, policy calls under pressure, and whether they coach managers or just do the job for them.
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring a
People Operations Manager
For hiring managers assessing a People Operations Manager: questions that test process redesign, HRIS ownership and data integrity, not just employee-experience language — because this role is judged on what breaks when nobody is watching.
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring a
Recruiter
For hiring managers and TA leads interviewing a recruiter who already knows the format better than the panel. Covers sourcing, screening, hiring manager pushback, closing and requisition load, with questions rehearsed answers can't survive.
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring a
Recruiting Coordinator
For hiring a Recruiting Coordinator — often someone's first talent acquisition role — questions that test composure, judgement and communication under a queue that never empties.
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring a
Sourcer
For TA leads hiring a sourcer, where tool familiarity is easy to test for and search reasoning is not. Covers Boolean craft, market mapping, response rates, hard pipelines and recruiter handoff, with real numbers, not impressions.
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring a
Talent Acquisition Manager
For hiring managers building a TA function that runs without them personally recruiting. Covers coaching, capacity planning, stakeholder pushback, and the shift from top recruiter to manager that most interviews never actually test.
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring a
Talent Acquisition Specialist
For hiring a Talent Acquisition Specialist — recruiter with a tidier title in some companies, the entire talent function in others — questions that reveal which version of the job this candidate can actually do.
Johnny Campbell
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Hiring an
HR Business Partner
The whole job comes down to one moment: does this person tell a senior leader an uncomfortable truth, or quietly update the org chart? These 25 questions test commercial fluency, influence and organisation design, not rapport.
Johnny Campbell
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