As the adage goes, “teamwork makes the dream work.” The saying holds true: 98% of employers think collaboration is one of the most crucial competencies for the workplace.
If you want to hire candidates who can collaborate well with teammates, you’re in the right place.
In this article, we’re sharing 29 interview questions to help you gauge a candidate’s collaboration abilities. Along with general collaboration questions, you’ll also find questions for related competencies, including influence and persuasion and relationship building.
There are a couple different ways you can approach this. The straightforward answer should be, “Well, the only opinion that matters is the opinion of the customer and user of your product or service.” But what do they think? Have you done user testing? What does the user testing show? Can you run an A/B test? What are the core variables here that you would want to isolate for A/B tests or multivariate tests? This is basically getting people to think about the customer and the prospect over internal voices and trying to really assess and validate the process that they would go through to actually do that.
As with so many CMO challenges, the answer is in the questions you ask. Better questions = better interviews = better hires. That formula has been mastered by Kipp Bodnar, CMO at Hubspot, who has built an industry-leading team of more than 200 professionals by honing the interview process. And while Bodnar tries to spend 20 to 30 hours with potential direct reports getting to know them intimately, he finds that the questions below are great for an initial assessment of curiosity, marketing savvy and ability to think on ones feet.
A bad answer would be if you pick a stage and dont really have any substance. That answer would be like someone saying, “I want to take that from 10 customers to 20 customers.” Well how would you do that? “Well, I would send them some more e-mail, or I would have my sales team follow up with those prospects more.” Some bland answers are pretty unspecific and arent driven from a track record of either trying to solve these problems before or having experience with these types of problems. Thats an example of an answer where Id think that the person just doesnt have the perspective necessary to solve these types of problems.
Firstly, Im making sure that they have read the blog. Are they up to date on it? Whats their perspective on it? Are the ideas interesting? What ideas are missing? Are there any problems they think we should fix? There are a bunch of different things you can interpret by just looking at a blog for 10 to 15 minutes. This question is to understand if they did it, and if they did, what lens did they do it through? Also, depending on who youre interviewing, theyre going to have a certain lens on the blog based on the type of role theyre interviewing for.
The thing I love about this question is that it gets people to interpret the problem based on who they are, and theres 100 right answers. Its actually in the justification and the deep dive into the strategy and tactics around those answers that you learn so much about how that person thinks and approaches solving problems as a marketer. I think its best when the candidates put the question in the context of the business that theyre interviewing with.
“Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.” —Katharine Whitehorn
Before your next job interview, it’s important to know your strengths. Doing the following exercise will help you prepare for questions about your qualifications:
Pro tip: Download this FREE Career Roadmap to discover your path to your dream job.
Why you need to address the fear
It’s true, there are some typical interview questions that you can prepare for. But having all of the right answers doesn’t guarantee you the job. And there are questions you just won’t be able to predict being asked.
One of the best ways to prepare for an interview (in addition to doing research) is to be yourself confidently.
Here are 8 quotes that will help you prepare for the interview and stay confident during the process.
I know this blog post is about building your self-confidence for an interview. This is why it’s important to prepare for the things you can predict. You can’t be yourself if you’re too stressed because you didn’t do research.