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An interview is a two-way street of answering but also asking questions. The potential employer wants to know about you, your background, and your skills. However, it is important to remember that they are also being interviewed by you.

Assessing a candidate’s soft skills in an interview is just as important as understanding their hard skills. To properly gauge their abilities, you as the hiring manager must ask open-ended questions.

When preparing for an interview, rarely do you need to practice the answers to questions about your past positions, current role, and the skills you have acquired. However, every interview includes some tough questions that can catch you off guard if you don’t have a plan on how to answer them.

Knowing how to talk about your weaknesses in a job interview can be difficult. However, it is important to understand the motivation behind the question in order to answer it favorably.

The question of “why did you leave your last job” or “why are you looking to leave your current job” is always asked at some point during the interview process. As recruiters, it is a question we always ask candidates as it’s a means of learning what motivates the candidate to pursue new work.

Assessing a candidate’s soft skills in an interview, just like the conducting of the interview itself, requires that you as the hiring manager are asking open-ended questions. To get a more accurate understanding of the candidate, be sure to give them the reins and let them showcase their marketable skills.

Asking “Do you have any questions for me?” gives your interviewee free-rein to show their personality outside the rigidity of the interview-structure. As an employer, you will be able to gain a lot of insight into the candidate from this portion of the interview but below are some noteworthy highlights.

This method is best applied to behavioral questions that refer to your past experiences, be them with a previous employer or just in general.