First-round interview questions that tell you something

What a first round is for

A first round has one job: decide who is worth more of your team's time. It isn't the place to learn everything about someone. You need just enough evidence on the few things that matter most.

That changes which questions earn their place. Each one should help you separate people who can do this job from people who can't yet. If every candidate would give roughly the same answer, the question isn't helping.

Ask about things that happened

Ask about real past work, not imagined situations or opinions. What would you do is easy to answer well. What did you do, and what happened, needs an actual example.

Behavioural questions usually have three parts: the situation, what the person did, and how it turned out. Ask for all three in the question itself. A person who rambles still gets the point, and you don't have to chase the missing piece.

It also pays to ask questions that are job-related at face value. Schmidt and Hunter describe structured interview questions as usually coming from a careful analysis of the job, and research since has kept structured interviews near the top of the list of selection methods.

How many questions to ask

Five is a good number for most roles. Choose three things that matter and give each one or two questions. That leaves room for real answers, and it respects the candidate's time.

Use the same questions in the same order for every candidate in the role. If you rephrase a question for one person, you're no longer comparing like with like.

Example questions that work for most roles

Swap in the details of the job. Each one asks for a real example.

• Tell me about the work you've done that best prepares you for this role.
• Walk me through a recent project you owned. What was your part, and how did it turn out?
• Describe a hard problem you solved at work. How did you decide what to do?
• Tell me about a decision that didn't go as planned. What did you change afterwards?
• Tell me about a time you disagreed with someone at work. What did you do, and what happened next?
• Describe a time you had too much to do. How did you choose what came first?
• Tell me about something you had to learn quickly for work. How did you go about it?
• How would you explain something complex in your field to someone new to it?

Write questions for the ear

Most first rounds are spoken, so read your questions out loud. Long sentences and stacked sub-questions are hard to hold in your head while you think of an example.

• Keep each question to one or two short sentences.
• Ask one thing at a time, plus the outcome.
• Cut company jargon and internal product names.
• Avoid yes or no questions.
• Don't hint at the answer you want.

Questions to skip

Some questions waste time. Brain teasers and favourite-animal questions tell you little about the job. What's your greatest weakness only produces rehearsed answers.

Others create legal risk. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says questions that would show someone's race, sex, national origin, disability, age, religion, colour or ancestry should be avoided, because they may be used as evidence of intent to discriminate. Employers are explicitly barred from asking about disability before a job offer. Stay away from these topics, even in friendly small talk:

• Age, graduation dates or how long someone plans to keep working.
• Family plans, pregnancy or childcare.
• Where someone was born, or their first language.
• Religion, or which holidays they observe.
• Health, medical history or disability.
• Marital status or who they live with.

Decide how you will score it first

Before you ask a question, write down what a strong answer sounds like. A strong answer is specific, describes the person's own part, explains why they acted as they did, and says what happened. A weak answer stays general or only describes what the team did.

Score each answer as you go. Waiting until the end brings back the overall impression that structure is meant to replace. Our guide to writing a screening rubric walks through this step by step.

Questions by role

The list above is a start, but specific questions beat general ones. Our role templates give you five questions and a three-part rubric for jobs such as customer support, sales development, software engineering and operations. Each question is tied to one criterion, and each criterion comes with notes on what a good answer sounds like.

Running them in Vettika

You can use any of these in Vettika. Paste a job description, and AI drafts questions and a rubric. You edit the questions, then take a practice run to hear how they sound. The AI interviewer then reads the same questions to every candidate through one shared link.

It won't ask follow-up questions, so write each question to stand on its own. If an answer is thin, it uses one fixed prompt and then moves on.

Sources

• Schmidt and Hunter (1998), The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology, Psychological Bulletin
• Sackett, Zhang, Berry and Lievens (2022), Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection, Journal of Applied Psychology
• US EEOC: Prohibited employment policies and practices
• US EEOC: Job applicants and the ADA

Common questions