13 Common Screening Interview Questions to Ask to Find Top Talent

Hiring efficiency matters now more than ever. With businesses demanding increasing efficiency from all departments, and job growth in critical verticals like hospitality, professional services, and healthcare, you’re going to need to sharpen every tool in your toolkit in order to keep ahead of the curve.

Taking a second look at your screening interview questions could be your next best step in adjusting your hiring process.

Because the right screening questions can help you move the best candidates into the interview process, leading to consistently better hires .

Not only will you get a list of 13 quality questions to implement into your candidate screening process out of this blog, but you'll also get a peek into the power of Hireflix and discover how you can ask these questions and screen 10, 100, or 1,000+ candidates at once.

Why Screening Interviews Are More Important Than Ever Before

As an interviewer, your role is like that of a gatekeeper. Your task is to ensure that any job candidate that makes it into the company deserves to be there and is successful and happy at the role. ( Forbes )

Competition for qualified candidates is ever-present, even as hiring teams are expected to deliver more with fewer resources. Getting your screening process right is how you stay competitive without adding to your workload.

Whether delivered through an in-person or a remote interview process, screening interview questions are a great way to eliminate candidates who are unqualified, underqualified, or unsuitable, leaving you to focus your time, energy, and resources only on those who are the best fit.

The Pitfalls of Asking Bad Screening Interview Questions

When done well, a screening process or pre-screening interview will help weed out unfit candidates. When done poorly, however, screening interview questions can sometimes cause more harm than good.

Creating Hiring Bias

Certain job interview questions can insert the potential for bias into your screening process.

Even something as simple as “Tell me about your accomplishments” can create a bias , particularly for candidates who come from cultures in which listing one’s personal accomplishments is seen as bragging or boasting. This question inserts a natural advantage for some while proving disadvantageous for others.

That is why, when creating screening interview questions, you must always carefully filter each potential question for hidden bias. If you miss this step in the process, you could create hidden barriers for some of your most qualified candidates before they even have a chance to advance in your interview process.

Ignoring ethical and legal considerations

When choosing your screening questions, another concern relates to compliance with legal and ethical guidelines. In efforts to protect privacy and ensure fairness, certain types of questions have been deemed off-limits, including queries related to:

• Sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity
• Marital or family status
• Race and ethnicity
• Disability
• Religion

Always ensure that screening interview questions are relevant and provide insight into a potential candidate's unique skills, experience, and fitness for the position and company culture while eliminating bias and complying with current legal and ethical guidelines.

13 Screening Interview Questions to Ask

When choosing which questions to include in your interview screening process, you have a wide variety of options from which to choose. These options must cover a variety of aspects, from skills to experience to personality.

You want to know both what a candidate can do and whether they will function well within a given work environment.

A well-structured battery of screening interview questions can help you judge a candidate’s levels of:

• Knowledge and experience
• Teamwork/cooperation
• Adaptability/creativity
• Critical/analytical thinking
• Relational strengths and weaknesses
• Communication skills
• Time management
• Attention to detail
• Decision making
• Integrity

To get started on the right foot, we recommend considering the following thirteen common interview questions (that you can also use in an asynchronous interview format).

Question 1: What initially attracted you to our company and this position?

This question is deceptively simple. Depending on how the candidate answers, you may receive a wealth of information.

• What the job seeker knows about your company
• Whether they understand the open position and what it entails
• Whether the candidate has the skills, experience, or enthusiasm needed to get the job done

Listen for the candidate’s understanding of your values and mission. Do they have a genuine interest, or does their answer sound generic? A candidate who has taken time to research your company and the role shows initiative.

Question 2: How would you describe your work style and approach to completing tasks?

This question helps you get a handle on the candidate’s soft skills and how well they will be able to fit into the work environment.

• What is their level of self-awareness?
• What instincts and personality traits can you observe in their answers?
• Do they understand and can they articulate the conditions under which they could thrive at work?
• Are the conditions they described a good match for the role they would be assuming if they got the job?

Question 3: Can you provide an example of a time when you had to overcome a significant challenge at work? How did you handle it?

Behavioral questions such as these do more than simply give you insight into how people approach handling challenges at work. They also offer an idea of what type of situation a candidate would classify as a “significant challenge” in the first place.

While listening to the answer, analyze both the approach they took and the steps they followed to resolve the challenge.

Also, listen to the way in which they talk about the other parties involved in the situation. Even if the other party was clearly in the wrong, speaking in a belittling or disparaging way is a major red flag.

Question 4: What is your experience with [specific skill or software relevant to the position]?

With this question, listen not just to what the candidate says but to how they say it.

Disorganized or overly long-winded answers may be a sign of someone overcompensating for a lack of skill or experience.

A job seeker who truly has experience with specific skills and software can generally speak to them competently, confidently, and concisely, even off the cuff. Someone who can do so is someone you’ll want to focus energy and attention on moving forward in the interview process.

Question 5: Can you tell me about a project you worked on that you are particularly proud of? What was your role, and what was the outcome?

This screening interview question can help you target people who have already achieved professional accomplishments within their field.

A strong answer will reveal the candidate’s capacity to take ownership of their work, as well as their ability to collaborate and contribute meaningfully to a team effort.

Those who cannot name a completed project in which they played a role, or those who pivot to personal accomplishments in lieu of professional ones, are not the candidates you will likely spend time to move on to the next step.

Question 6: How do you prioritize competing tasks and responsibilities in your work?

Answers to this screening question will help you understand:

• How a job seeker understands and prioritizes tasks
• How they determine levels of urgency
• How they plan to manage their workload

Look for evidence that the candidate can balance projects effectively and work under pressure. A good response will usually describe a system or strategy they use to stay organized and make sure deadlines are met.

Question 7: Describe a time when you had to work with a difficult colleague or team member. How did you handle the situation?

Does this candidate know how to take positive, proactive steps to resolve friction and strife within a team, particularly where difficult colleagues or team members are involved?

Mature, professional job seekers can articulate how they have solved conflicts in the past, giving you an idea of how they will handle similar situations in the future.

Question 8: How do you stay updated on new developments or changes in your field?

This question is all about how the candidate keeps up with changes in their industry.

The best candidates will be proactive about learning new things, whether that’s through reading articles, attending webinars, or just staying connected with others in their field.

Pay attention to how they talk about adapting to new tools or trends. Do they get excited about learning, or do they seem resistant to change?

The ideal answer will show that they’re always looking to grow and adjust to stay relevant in a fast-changing environment.

Question 9: How do you handle and resolve conflicts with clients or customers?

Ideally, the candidate will name a particular instance from their past job experience and describe the actions they took to resolve the situation. This example will give you a good idea of whether their customer service skills are a match for the position at hand.

If they cannot do so, it’s likely because they lack the skills or experience necessary for the role. You can feel comfortable not moving them forward in the hiring process and targeting your attention elsewhere.

Question 10: What are your long-term career goals, and how do you see this position fitting into those goals?

How a candidate answers this question can tell you more than just where they would like to see themselves in five or ten years. Their answer can also reveal whether the open position, or the company offering the job, will hold them long-term or if they’re likely to use the position to leapfrog to something else.

A candidate with well-thought-out goals that mesh with your company’s path is more likely to stay engaged and motivated.

Question 11: Can you tell me about a time when you took a risk or tried something new at work? What was the outcome?

What you’re listening for here is not so much whether the candidate takes risks but what their approach to taking risks is, and what sort of move they consider a “risk.”

Did they weigh risks and rewards, and how did they learn from the outcome, whether successful or not? A good answer should show that the candidate is not afraid to innovate but is also cautious and responsible.

Question 12: If you were given an unlimited budget and resources, what project or initiative would you pursue in this position?

Does the job seeker have a vision for the future: dreams and aspirations that go beyond the open position and could uplift not only the company but also the entire industry? Do they have initiative and express innovative ideas?

Potential candidates in this part of the hiring process will show that they can think critically and use their vision to address real-world challenges, even if the resources are limitless.

Question 13: Describe a time when you had to adapt to a significant change in your work environment or processes. How did you handle the change, and what was the outcome?

This behavioral screening interview question will help you evaluate how the job seeker copes with change.

What you’re looking for here are signs of:

• Cooperation
• Flexibility
• Adaptability

While change can be hard for everyone, it’s harder for some people than for others, and those who have difficulty adapting when the situation calls for it may not be the best choice to move forward in the hiring process.

How Hireflix Can Help

Here at Hireflix, our one-way video interview software is an efficient and effective way to conduct digital screening interviews. This allows both you and your job seekers to make the best use of your time.

Thanks to Hireflix, you can set up your screening in just a few simple steps.

1. Record your screening questions
2. Accept candidate responses
3. Review and share submissions among your hiring team
4. Eliminate or advance candidates accordingly

By using Hireflix’s one-way video interview software for screening interviews, you can save yourself time and energy while still accelerating your hiring process. This reduces the chance that the most qualified candidate will be hired elsewhere before you get a chance to interview them.

Want to see how Hireflix works in practice? Watch the demo to explore its features and workflow.

Ask the Right Questions in Your Screening Interviews

There’s no doubt that establishing a system for screening interview questions can improve your hiring process. But the thought of getting started might seem daunting.

If you are a hiring manager, recruiter, human resource professional, or anyone else involved in hiring, you may be wondering the best way to implement an effective and efficient screening process.

The good news is that Hireflix can help. Our powerful automation tools can help you build a simple and sustainable system that does the hard work on your behalf. Request a demo today!