High-Impact Interview Questions

High-Impact Interview Questions
701 Behavior-Based Questions to Find the Right Person for Every Job
Author: Victoria A. Hoevemeyer
Publisher: AMACOM
Publication date: 2006
ISBN: 0814473016
Number of pages: 192
Format: PDF

High-Impact Interview Questions has a no-nonsense, practical bent. Focused on both the art and the science of effective job interviews, it’s clearly intended as a manual for everyday use by hiring managers and human-resource professionals across a wide range of organizations. Author Victoria Hoevemeyer has worked for over 20 years in organizational development and leadership coaching from her home base of Illinois, and her expertise shows through in the direct, straightforward tone suffusing this book.

Victoria Hoevemeyer advances a philosophy which she terms “Competency-Based Behavioral Interviewing” (CBBI). Her basic premise is that past performance is the best predictor of future performance, and that the more recent a particular behavior, the stronger of a predictor it will be. If you accept those assumptions, then much of what follows in the book’s explanations of CBBI are highly logical.

The most valuable part of High-Impact Interview Questions is its extensive catalog of sample interview questions, grouped according to the underlying quality which they’re meant to uncover. After introducing CBBI and showing how it ties specific and precise interview questions back to the functional competencies job seekers will need in a particular position, the book provides a very handy guide to sample questions which any interviewer can use. Interested in a candidate’s decision-making ability? Try “Describe a time you had to make a quick decision with incomplete information?” How about attention to detail? For that, the book prescribes queries like, “Tell me about a time when you caught an error that others had missed.”

This book is a worthwhile read for those job interviewers who believe in competency-based questions and want an efficient guide to learning about interviewees’ true potential.