When you are interviewing a prospective employee, you look for specific answers and personality traits that best fit your company’s profile. In your search for the right answers, are you asking the right questions? Open-ended questions will help you evoke the answers you want from candidates, without prompting or attaching a value judgment. The following list of questions will help fine tune your interviewing skills and help you get the best candidate for the job.

1. How have your past job experiences prepared you directly or indirectly for this position?
2. How would you describe your previous supervisor? In what ways were you alike and different?
3. Describe an unpleasant work situation and how you dealt with it.
4. What methods do you use to make decisions?
5. What methods have you found successful in setting job objectives for yourself?
6. In what ways did your previous job prepare you for greater responsibilities?
7. Under what kind of conditions do you feel you learn best?
8. What is your interpretation of success?
9. If you could structure the perfect job for yourself, what would you do and why?
10. Give some standard examples of situations in which you have been criticized. How do you react and why?
11. What kind of challenges do you feel bring out your potential?
12. In what areas do you feel you would like to develop further? How do you plan to do that?

These are just some examples of open-ended questions that can help you land the right candidate for your opening.