When you're ready to hire someone new for your team, it's important to think about what questions you should ask during the interview. You want to focus on the questions that are most relevant for your team and role you're hiring for, so you can understand how candidates will use their skills and experience to contribute to your company.

Look for someone with different areas of expertise from your own—this way, you can supercharge your team and get more done!

What Are the Questions Asked in Leadrship / Cultural Fit Interview?

Sitting someone down for an interview is often stressful and difficult, but with some preparation ahead of time you can make it much easier to find the right person for your team.

We’ve put together a list of Leadrship / Cultural Fit interview questions that will help you evaluate candidates and determine whether they’re a good fit for your team.

Below are the Leadrship / Cultural Fit interview questions we've had the most success with over the years. They're meant to be used as a guide. You can add your own questions and tweak them as needed.

We've divided them into three sections:

• Delivers value fast

• Positive influence

• Owns what they build

• Curious

• Understands the business outcome

• Deals with ambiguous problems

Delivers value fast

• Tell me about a time you had to deliver a project under significant time pressure? What trade-offs did you have to make?

• What project are you most proud of? Why are you proud if it?

• If you had to ship twice as often as you currently do, what would you do differently? 10 times as often?

• Give me an example of a project you were helped with in that required working with multiple teams. What challenges did you have? How did you make this work more smoothly?

• When do you think you have built enough value and can ship?

• How do you keep your pull requests small?

Positive influence

• Tell me about a time you went above and beyond for your team or the broader organisation.

• Tell me about a system or process you improved that was already working well.

• Describe an improvement you made to the way your team works. What was the outcome?

• How have you created relationships with other people outside your immediate team.

• Give me an example where you solved a problem that was not your job.

Owns what they build

• In terms of code you or your team wrote, where do you think your ownership ends?

• Tell me about a time you built something with some issues after launch, and what did you do? How did you prevent that type of problem reappearing in future launches?

• Tell me about a time you had to solve a problem in a live system. How did you know there was a problem? How did you enlist others to help? How did you prevent this problem from occurring again?

Curious

• Tell me about a time you disagreed with your team, and they were right. What was the situation, and the outcome?

• Tell me about a situation where you were right, but your team decided something else.

• Describe the last piece of information or lesson you shared with your team or a broader group. How did you share it?

• Describe something you have taught to others in your organisation.

Understands the business outcome

• In your current or last role, who are your customers? What do they value the most? Why do they value that?

• How do you know you are personally delivering value to your customers? How do you find out this for yourself, beyond any specification?

• What is success for your team look like? How do you make your team more successful?

• Describe a time to solve a problem you had to learn the business or problem domain beyond the code.

Deals with ambiguous problems

• Describe a time you had to solve an ambiguous problem. What made it ambiguous?

• Give me an example where you were handed an ambiguous problem. How did you make it less ambiguous?

• You need to work on a task, but the requirements are not quite clear. What do you do?

• ‍

Interview Scorecard Templates by InterviewTime

To save everyone's time, InterviewTime has created a list of templates available for you to use as-is or as inspiration for creating your own interview scorecard template based on what information will be useful for hiring in your company!

To learn more about scorecards, check out our article - Interview scorecard: pros & cons.