5 Questions to Ask When Hiring an Employee for Your Small Business

When hiring an employee for your small business, it’s important to ask the right questions to your potential hire. Hiring the wrong employees could affect the success of your business. If your business is customer service based, having the right employees represent your brand is crucial. After you’ve hired them, having a plan for training them is important as well, but that’s another blog. Know that sometimes hiring the right person can be tricky. Knowing how to find that right hire is important as well and you can read about that here.

When looking to scale your business you want new hires to have your companies vision at heart. You want them to want your business to thrive. Someone that can be a leader, yet fall in line. You want them to be motivated. It’s hard when it is your own business that you’re asking someone to work for. We have an instinct to want them to love your company as much as you do. We also tend to feel we could just do the job better yourselves. Trusting them is important, and trusting yourself to make the right decision to hire the right person is even more significant.

Here are 5 questions we felt were great places to start when thinking of what you will ask when you sit down with a potential hire.

1. Tell me a little about yourself?

This is probably one of the most popular questions to start with. However, it’s a question a lot of people fail to rehearse. Maybe it’s because we feel like we know ourselves so well. But it’s broad and very open-ended. It allows someone to either tell you too much or too little. Either way, their answer gives you a great glimpse into who they are. If they will be a good fit for your business. Are they charismatic? Will they keep people happy, or make your clients want to come back for more? Or are they better suited somewhere else? Or for that matter, for another position possibly then the one you are interviewing them for? You see this all the time with Actors and Actresses. They are brought in to audition for a small minor role that they feel they would be best suited for and come out knocking it out of the park and get the lead! Next thing you know, they are winning an Oscar for Best Actor in YOUR movie!

2. What Professional Achievement Are You Most Proud Of?

This question is at the top of our list as well, This helps you understand numerous things about your potential hire. By the way, he or she answers this question you get a sense of many things. What kind of work have they done before and how well they did it. What kind of tasks they were assigned. What kind of leadership might they have taken? It also gives you a wonderful sense of what’s important to them. How passionate about that moment were they as they described it? Was this achievement professional or personal? How fast did they think on their feet? Most importantly, what were the results if any of this achievement? The answers to all these questions give you a great place to see overall, who this person is and what kind of worker they will be.

3. What is your greatest strength? Greatest Weakness?

This is a great question! By asking this question, you will get a better grasp on how they might succeed in your business. When you’re hiring an employee you want to know, do they take criticism well? How self-reflective are they? You will find out a lot about a person on how they answer this.

4. What do they feel they can bring to your company if they get the job?

We always think this is a great question to ask. It will show you how much they know about your company, but how much they believe they can make a difference. I love being able to be sold something even if you’re not sure if you need it. You want to feel good about what your buying right? Why not feel good about who you’re hiring? Give your potential to hire a chance to be charismatic. Let them show you what they are great at. How they feel they will help you grow and where they can bring life and success in your business.

5. Do you have any questions for me?

This gives you an idea if they are curious anymore about you or the company they might work for. It doesn’t necessarily say whether you have a good candidate or not. But it’s a great question to see their interest, or to even clear things up more so they know if they are a good fit for you.