Top Workplaces: What to ask (and not ask) a job candidate

There's more to evaluating a prospective employee than looking at résumés and adding up which candidates have the most skills. And one big factor in determining who will be the best fit is the job interview.

According to Kelly Ramirez, regional vice president of operations-Wisconsin for QPS Employment Group, employers should use open-ended questions — as opposed to simple yes-or-no questions — to get candidates to talk about themselves.

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The interview, Ramirez said, should be a conversation "looking at values and motivation, really looking to see whether a candidate just wants to make a living with your company or make a difference with your company."

That strategy accomplishes several things.

“You’ll get a bit of a viewpoint of what they consider important based on what they decide to tell you,” Ramirez said. “To really find a great candidate, you need to find someone who holds some of the same values that you have as a company.”

Also, Ramirez said, "It’s super important for you to interview and try to find candidates that are going to want to work hard for those around them as well, not just for their direct manager but really for the people that sit next to them every day."

Among other questions that spur conversation:

• "Tell me about a time you handled a difficult interaction with your boss. What was the situation and how did you handle it?"
• "Tell me about a time you had to work with somebody in your office who had a distinctly different personality than you have."

Of course, there are some things a potential employer might be temped to ask but that should be avoided, said Rufino Gaytán an associate attorney in the labor and employment practice group at Godfrey & Kahn S.C. in Milwaukee.

For instance, don’t ask a job applicant anything about a so-called protected characteristic, including such things as race, religion and sexual orientation.

Among the other items that employers need to be aware of are noncompete agreements, known in legal circles as restrictive covenant agreements.

Especially in a world of rapidly changing technology, employers must be extremely careful, Gaytán said.

"There is a lot of room for mistakes in that hiring process," Gaytán said. "One of the things that employers have to be careful about when hiring somebody is particularly if they are hiring an individual from another employer who may be in the same industry."

That becomes especially crucial if they hire someone away from a competitor.

"That individual applicant might have a restrictive covenant agreement," Gaytán said. "If they do, the new employer wants to make sure they are not running afoul of any restrictions that employee might still owe to that prior employer, assuming the agreement is enforceable.

"That’s a big issue that comes up fairly often," Gaytán added. "It varies depending on the industry, but it’s something that comes up often enough that I think it’s a concern for most employers nowadays."