We have received input from executive level candidates on their candidate experience and thought it worth sharing so you can ace your executive candidate interviews. Whether or not you are interested in the executive candidate for the role, the candidate should walk away from your interview/company with the best of impressions, wanting them to want your job and have a positive impression of your organization. To do that, you need to be prepared. Knowing that everyone is very busy and sometimes prepping for an executive candidate interview is a time challenge, it is well worth doing. To aid you in your preparation, we have put together some interview questions/ thought provoking dialogue. Our goal is to make you look the very best and to allow you to be prepared. Here are some interview/alignment questions/thought processes that we have found effective. We are not a fan of trick questions, putting executive candidates on the spot, as this does not make the best impression, and it also appears amateurish. As most executive candidates are responsible for both strategic and tactical results you want to make sure that they are both thinker and doer.
Executive Interview Questions:
- Describe a time that you had to achieve XYZ for a previous employer, how did you do that, how long did it take you, how successful where you?
Our goal with this question is to allow you to find out how an executive candidate will handle your business challenges by understanding how they have handled similar situations in the past with previous employers. This allows you to understand their judgement, thought process, decision making, strategy and finally their ability to solve the problem or challenge effectively and with great results. This will also give you an idea of the areas that the executive candidate may find difficult or challenging.
- What size organization and budgets has this executive candidate worked for and within in the past to achieve a result?
The goal here is to see if this executive is a culture fit for your organization. If they have worked mostly for large companies with a lot of resources, you may question if they are a culture fit for a startup. Have they managed to create a result with small budgets, are they agile and scrappy or are they used to a lot of layers of decision making and slow decision making processes with large budgets? For a marketing executive, you need to ask, if this executive had a large advertising budget and were representing an iconic brand in the past, what if any translation will you achieve with a unknown brand and little or no budget?
- Try to avoid obvious questions. Hopefully, you have a sourcer, prior to the executive candidate reaching your desk, so you know that any concerns in logistics, gaps in employment, a lot of movement, their willingness to relocate, their commute time comfort level, their virtual work desires/needs, their price range, etc. have already been addressed and aligned.
- What is the executive candidate’s values and do these values align with your organization’s values. Ask questions around what the executive candidate values in a work environment and make sure these key values align with your organizations key values.
- Is the executive candidate passionate about your offering, do they become excited, inspired by the role and what the role entails? Do they see the same destination that you/your company does at the 1 year plan for the role?
- How well does the executive candidate tell a story? Ask them to tell a story about themselves, this will allow you to see how good of a storyteller they are, and what they value in their own experiences.
- How well do you handle difficult situations, what do you do when you are faced with one, how did you not give up? As in anything, there will always be difficult times, you want to get an understanding of how this executive candidate responds to difficulty.
These are some suggestions for questions to get an executive candidate in a conversation about what they have done in the past and how their successes and challenges can add to your organization’s goals.