Your leadership interview questions play a crucial role when hiring leaders. Knowing what qualities your ideal leader should have isn’t enough; you must also ask the right questions to assess these skills. Despite their importance, many hiring managers don’t understand how and when to ask these questions for optimum results, leading to poor hiring decisions.
Hiring good leaders for your team is straightforward, with insightful interview questions. Come along as we discuss why leadership interview questions matter and when to use them in the hiring funnel. We’ve also prepared an extensive list of interview questions for you, so dive right in!
Why do leadership interviews matter?
Poor leadership is detrimental—82% of American workers, according to a 2022 GoodHire survey, would potentially quit due to a poor manager. To avoid this, you must select leaders who fit both your organization and the role itself. Leadership interviews are instrumental to the hiring process and offer several key benefits, as you’ll see below:
1. To evaluate problem-solving and analytical skills
Complex situations are common in any organization’s day-to-day activities. To keep the team moving forward, good leaders should be able to analyze a problem and swiftly propose a logical solution from the available information.
By leveraging situational interview questions for managers, you can inquire about how the candidate responded when faced with similar challenges in the past. Based on their response, you can gauge their ability to lead a team in the right direction, even in difficult circumstances.
2. They facilitate the assessment of candidates’ communication styles
Healthy communication is critical to managing a team and gaining their trust. Though pre-employment tests are great for assessing this skill, you also need to hear candidates communicate in a practical setting and observe their non-verbal cues. Leadership interviews let you interact with them directly and judge their thought process, articulation, and engagement, all important components of team leadership.
3. They aid in gauging leadership style for culture fit
A leader may have strong qualifications but struggle to align with the team’s culture, and you want to avoid this scenario to prevent friction. Besides evaluating their skill, leadership interviews provide insight into your candidates’ leadership styles, values, and approaches to team building. From your observation, you can determine how seamlessly they’ll fit into the company, enhance innovation, and create positive influence.
4. To assess emotional intelligence
Leadership involves managing diverse personalities and ensuring strong interpersonal relationships, both of which demand high emotional intelligence. With leadership interview questions and observation, you can check which candidates navigate emotions fairly and objectively, making everyone feel heard and valued. This reveals not only their ability to achieve goals but also their capacity to build trust and unity within the team.
5. To supplement general skill assessment results with personal insights
Skill assessments accurately evaluate candidates’ skills and qualities, but for highly people-centric roles like leadership, it’s good practice to assess them personally before extending an offer. This way, you can engage with your candidates, see them apply their abilities in real life, and intuitively gauge their suitability for the role.
Moreover, certain qualities, such as charisma, may be harder to quantify in assessments, and leadership interviews are perfect for evaluating them.
6 key leadership skills and qualities to assess in an interview
To ask the right questions in leadership interviews, you must first understand what skills and qualities an outstanding leader should have. Below, we’ll discuss 6 key leadership qualities to look for in interviews and why they’re important.
1. Communication
Several aspects of good leadership hinge on healthy communication, from team building to goal setting and sharing. Thus, it’s no surprise that a 2022 Training magazine survey has listed it as one of the top five priority leadership skills for five consecutive years.
Beyond team leadership, communication skills also influence external stakeholders’ trust in your organization. To this effect, check that your candidate can both articulate their thoughts and actively listen to others to prevent communication gaps.
2. Problem-solving and decision-making
A leader’s ability to navigate pressure and obstacles determines the company’s growth and stability, making problem-solving an important leadership skill to test. In leadership interviews, study how they approach difficulties, dissect problems, and decide on strategies to solve them. This way, you can be sure that despite how sudden the challenge is, your candidate is prepared to tackle it and guide the organization through it.
3. Adaptability
Change gives way to growth, so flexibility, adaptability, and an open mind are top criteria to assess when interviewing for strong leaders. Rather than sticking to a predefined course, leaders should be willing to switch their priorities or strategies to reflect the current situation.
Find out how they responded to sudden change and how quickly they restrategized when facing setbacks. This will inform you about their readiness to embrace and learn from new, unexpected circumstances.
4. Emotional intelligence (EI)
Even the most visionary leaders risk losing their team without emotional intelligence. To guide the team toward a goal, the leader must build and nurture relationships to raise morale, which, in turn, increases productivity.
Emotional intelligence helps with this task, helping the leader manage emotions and dynamics within the team. To check how skilled the candidate is in this area, inquire about their relationships with previous teammates or how they handled a misunderstanding with empathy.
5. Collaboration and teamwork
Under a leader who prioritizes collaboration, a team is sure to reach its goals faster and more efficiently. By working together, team members share ideas and inspire each other, leading to higher creativity and innovation. During leadership interviews, candidates should describe how they can foster a culture of teamwork in the organization, as this contributes significantly to its growth and success.
6. Integrity
Leaders set the pace for other team members, so leaders without integrity undoubtedly cause others to follow suit and create problems for the organization. To prevent this, you must find out how ethical your candidates are in decision-making, especially when it’s inconvenient to do so. By making moral, ethical choices in line with the organization’s values, leaders promote transparency and trust in the team, improving work culture.
31 top leadership interview questions
After identifying what skills you need, you must craft questions that can identify candidates with these skills. Here, we’ve curated a comprehensive list of leadership interview questions to assess your candidates’ behavior, judgment, and leadership capacity.
10 situational leadership interview questions
1. Assuming your new team members struggle to accept your leadership, how would you earn their trust?
2. Describe how you would motivate a discouraged team.
3. If your team misses an important deadline, how would you reassure clients or stakeholders?
4. What steps would you take to bring a new team member on board?
5. How would you ensure accountability in your new team?
6. If you notice a communication lapse within the team, how would you address this?
7. Describe the steps you would take to allocate resources fairly, particularly when there are constraints.
8. How would you resolve a serious misunderstanding within your team?
9. If an important team member suddenly leaves, how would you ensure continuity?
10. How would you ensure collaboration with other members of the senior leadership team?
10 behavioral leadership interview questions
1. Describe your typical relationships with previous team members.
2. Have you ever failed to meet a target? How did you handle it?
3. How do you show empathy in difficult conversations?
4. Describe a time you had to make a tough decision that tested your integrity.
5. Describe your typical reaction in times of crisis.
6. How do you approach team diversity and collaborate with team members who have contrasting opinions?
7. How do you handle positive and negative feedback?
8. How do you manage your emotions when under pressure or upset?
9. Describe a time you had to communicate difficult news or feedback and how it was received.
10. On a scale of 1 to 10, how transparent would you say you are with your team members?
11 analytical leadership interview questions
1. Can you walk us through your thought process when faced with difficult decisions?
2. Describe a time you solved a complex problem and how your result impacted the organization.
3. Describe a time you developed and executed long-term goals that were in line with the company’s vision. What were your results?
4. How do you handle short-term or unforeseen changes?
5. How do you analyze information before taking action?
6. How do you break long-term goals into actionable steps?
7. How do you delegate roles to your team members?
8. Describe how you identify and dissect problems before solving them.
9. How do you align your team’s goals with market and industry conditions to maintain relevance?
10. Describe what steps you would take to predict obstacles when strategizing.
11. How do you measure success as a leader?
At what stage of the hiring funnel should you use leadership interview questions?
In addition to their structure, where you use leadership interview questions in the hiring funnel matters. While they can be applied anywhere in the funnel, they offer the best results in the mid-to-late interview stages. Here’s how they fit into each stage.
1. Mid-stage (first/second interviews)
Here, you’re testing for basic leadership capacity to ensure only those who demonstrate strong potential move to the next stage. Questions at this stage are usually more generic, inquiring about the candidate’s ability to carry a team along without asking for in-depth, complex details. Likely questions for this phase include:
- Questions about previous leadership experience.
- Scenario-based questions that evaluate general leadership skills like communication and conflict resolution.
2. Late-stage (final rounds)
At this stage, you’ve screened out the candidates who fail to meet your basic leadership requirements. Now, the interview questions are more detailed and nuanced to help you pick the most qualified candidate for fast-paced, executive-level positions. For example, you could ask:
- In-depth behavioral leadership questions.
- Scenario-based questions about managing large teams or executing complex projects.
- Questions that require strategic thinking, vision, and analytical skills.
Generally, the depth and complexity of your questions should match the hiring funnel stage and rank of the role. Basic leadership questions are suitable for identifying potential in entry-level positions and at early interview stages. In contrast, the more senior positions demand complex questions, especially at the final interview rounds.
This arrangement ensures maximum efficiency and results by allocating interview resources to more qualified candidates, thus improving time-to-hire and reducing costs.
Also, by focusing on the top candidates, you can evaluate them more deeply, as both you and the candidates have established foundational qualifications and job context. This leads to a smoother interview, improving candidate experience and interest in the role.
How to choose the right leaders for your team
What steps can you take to choose the right leader for your team? The quality of your candidates depends on your hiring strategy, and in this section, we’ll explore four simple steps you should take when hiring leaders.
1. Identify your organization’s leadership needs
Although there are general skills every leader should have, every organization still has its specific leadership needs. Noting what your organization requires in a leader helps you create better job descriptions, thus improving your candidate quality.
Carefully analyze your organization’s current state, vision, and obstacles to the vision. Then, define what qualities a leader will need to deal with the obstacles and reach the team’s objectives.
2. Conduct leadership skill assessments
After receiving the candidates’ applications, conduct leadership skill assessments to separate proficient applicants from the unqualified ones. Leadership skill assessments are tests that check a candidate’s job fit for a leadership position using objective, scenario-based questions relevant to the job.
Administering this test streamlines your hiring process, as you can focus on only a few top performers rather than the entire applicant pool. However, to get highly accurate results, it’s advisable to use trusted software like Vervoe.
Vervoe is a modern, comprehensive hiring and recruitment solution comprising a robust suite of features, including skill assessments and job simulations. Our assessment library includes over 300 templates and 300,000 questions, so whether you want a ready-made or custom test, Vervoe has what you need.
Moreover, our job simulations provide an immersive, realistic way to see candidates’ leadership skills in action. This feature allows you to evaluate hard-to-assess soft skills and watch candidates navigate realistic leadership scenarios.
Vervoe also guarantees foolproof accuracy and instant grading for every assessment with our advanced AI grading and ranking feature. It lets you determine what leadership skills are a top priority for you, training the system to grade candidates accordingly, increasing ease and efficiency.
3. Review candidates with interviews and reference checks
Next, interview top-performing candidates to interact with them and gauge their behavioral tendencies. Use structured interviews with tailored questions that specifically target leadership qualities and decision-making capacity.
For added verification, you can also crosscheck with their references to get in-depth information about their track record. This helps you confirm your evaluations and provides a more comprehensive understanding of the candidate’s leadership capacity and results.
4. Group assessments
As a final check, you want to assess how the candidate performs in group settings, as this will form the majority of the position’s responsibilities. Even after testing candidates individually, you should also observe how they carry a team along, as this shows how successful they’ll be in the role. Create group activities that place candidates in collaborative situations, then observe how they interact with others to reach a solution.
Hire a solid leadership team with Vervoe
Leadership roles are among the most sensitive positions to hire for in an organization, and mistakes here can be quite costly. To hire leaders that are right for you, you must be highly strategic at every stage of the hiring process, including interview questions and assessments.
Vervoe’s assessment library is vast and complete with assessments for several leadership qualities and roles. In addition to conducting objective evaluations, our situational, job-specific assessments also give you ideas for your leadership interview questions.
Want to see our software in action? Register for a free demo and let Vervoe transform your hiring strategy today.
