Stop! Just stop! It only makes your company look strange. Either if you are directly interviewing candidates, retrieving them from 3rd party recruiters, or using a hiring manager on your team, there are pretty much the most idiotic questions that you ask that are making your brand image suffer.
Yes, as business owners, in this economic climate you have the upper hand. (It is a buyer’s market in employment.) But that doesn’t rectify your decisions on asking idiotic questions to your candidates for the sole reason of sifting through your candidate lists.
You can easily sift through by eliminating outright incompatibilities such as whether the candidate has what you are looking for. The flaw in this strategy is that you are losing a lot of potentially better candidates because you don’t have an open mind. For example, you may be directed by your IT team that you use AngularJS but the candidate has jQuery instead. Truth of the matter is that if that candidate has jQuery experience, that more than likely means they have pure JavaScript experience and that AngularJS is a library much like jQuery, this candidate’s knowledge and experience in pure JavaScript and jQuery clearly proves that they have the know-how to adapt into your tech team and get up to speed with your specific AngularJS environment.
Never ask your candidates “Why do you want this job?”
This is pretty common, particularly throughout Nashville. Again, just because this is a buyer’s market in employment, doesn’t mean you could degrade your candidate by putting them on the spot with this type of question. It is not relevant to the job duties and should never be used as a factor of elimination.
Never stare and outright lie to your candidate’s face
At the end of the interview, most employers or hiring managers already know right up front what their decision is. Unless you are a low level hiring manager and need approval by the senior level management, the decision should take no more than one week (five business days) to make. And you should always directly email your candidate or call them with you decision either way. Never leave your candidate hanging. Again, this comes back to tarnishing your company’s brand image. Word of mouth travels and travels far! Who knows if your candidate knows potential large clients in any way? Truthfulness and respect goes a long way for your candidate. It lessens the blow to the candidate.