College Interview Questions
College interview questions are a little different from your normal employment interview questions. You are addressing people with little or no work experience.
Before I jump into the discussion of how they are different though, let’s take a minute to understand how they are the same. Your goal in a college interview is to determine how the person is going to handle the tasks and situation on your job. No different from a regular interview. The best way to get that information is to learn how the person has handled similar situations in the past.
You still want to ask questions with the same characteristics of the best interview questions. You want to create the interview questions using the same process as well.
The challenge when dealing with younger people is to find those situations where they had the opportunity to demonstrate the behavior or skill you need. With a little thought you can almost always solve this problem.
Let’s pretend you need someone to write marketing documents on your job. Although the recent grad most likely has not done that, they should have written some complex document during their studies. You can explore how they researched the document, how they organized it and how they proofed the final version. Generate questions that get this information and you will have a solid understanding of the person’s writing skills.
You might need a person who can follow instructions for your job. Find a situation in the person’s past where they worked on a large project. Ask about how the project was communicated. What instructions did they receive? What questions did they ask? How did they track progress?
Once again the answers to these questions provide you with information about how the person follows instructions.
You certainly need to work harder to generate your college interview questions. But, if you follow this simple model you will develop the right questions to use in the interview process.
