When interviewing an applicant for any position of a job, there are set rules to go by. On paper, a job interview seems pretty simple. When it is on paper, it consists of a hand shake, small talk, questions, and then it is time to compare candidates. There is a lot that goes into a job interview. As a manager you have to make sure that you do not hire a bad candidate. When you hire a bad candidate the effects are devastating to the company. There is a lot of money that is lost when a bad hiring is conducted. Along with the money that is lost, the morale of the good employees is lost because of the bad employee. And there is a potential loss of customers if the bad employee works up front with the public and is in the public’s eye. There is a wasted salary which is expensive and puts a big dent into the company’s pocket. Then, there is severance payments. A severance payment is the payment made to an employee upon their dismissal from employment.

After the severance pay, there is the wasted training time. With the wasted training time, there could have been problems with how the bad hire acted with the customers. This could cause the customers that had the problem to not return. Then, you have to start recruiting someone new which could lead to the same problems all over again. Especially if a bad recruit is hired into the work place to replace the other bad recruit. And this starts a very vicious cycle that is quite common in the fast food and hospitality industry of today.

There are set questions that you as a manager should ask when conducting an interview. You should ask fact based questions. Or, you can ask general questions. In an interview there are questions that are asked to clarify the information that was listed on the resume of the applicant. This is a good time to ask the applicant why they are wanting to pursue a career within your company.

Then, you need to ask the situational questions. These questions are about what they would do if they caught a coworker stealing from the company. This is also the time to ask hypothetical questions. These questions are basically the same thing but worded a different way. But, these questions are very important to be asked. This is how you know what the applicant would do in that particular situation.

Next, you need to ask stress questions. These questions are designed to directly put someone into a stressful situation in a hypothetical sense. The objective is to see how the candidate would act in a stressful situation. And it is also designed to see how they would react if they are confronted while the environment is stressful. This ties into the next category of questions that needs to be asked.

Behavioral questions are the final questions that needs to be asked. The theory about asking about their behavior in previous situations is because it is believed that past performances are a predictor of future performances. But, this is not always the case. Sometimes, the applicant could have had a bad past performance at a previous establishment at no fault of their own but because the manager there was not a good manager or good team leader. This cannot be pinned onto the applicant. Throughout the work world, there are places that will pin the bad management style onto the workers which in turn makes it harder for them to find a new job. This is what has to be taken into consideration when you are doing an interview.