Unique interview questions are a must if you want to visualize candidate potential and hire effectively. While standard, everyday questions may seem more straightforward, they’re also easily anticipated by candidates. This means that they’re likely to get you unoriginal answers that do little to reveal candidates’ reactions in complex situations.
By asking thought-provoking, insightful questions, you can steer the interview away from generic answers and prompt thorough, original responses. In this article, we’ll discuss what unique interview questions are, how they differ from common questions, and why they’re important to your hiring process. We’ve also provided a comprehensive list of unique interview questions for you to pick from.
What are unique interview questions?
Unique interview questions are interview questions that probe candidates’ abilities beyond the surface. They are more intricate than traditional ones, usually in the form of behavioral or situational interview questions that predict their likely behavior in realistic workplace scenarios.
These questions help you assess the candidate’s creativity, interpersonal skills, and ability to solve problems on the spot. With this information, you have a clearer image of how they’ll fit into your company culture and organizational values and whether they’re right for your team.
Unique vs common interview questions
Unique interview questions are nuanced and specific to skills needed for the role you’re interviewing candidates for. These questions usually have a creative twist and take an interactive, outside-the-box, less familiar approach, resulting in distinct responses about their abilities and personalities.
On the other hand, common interview questions are routine and standard. These questions assess surface-level skill with an obvious, direct focus on the candidate’s background and experience. Although helpful in providing context and conducting a comprehensive interview, they may not deliver the best outcomes on their own.
Examples of common interview questions include:
- Tell me about yourself.
- What are your strengths and weaknesses?
- Why do you want this job?
Why use unique interview questions?
Common interview questions allow for surface evaluation only, and this could cause bias or recruitment mistakes. As such, unique interview questions are a must. Here are four reasons to incorporate unique interview questions in your hiring process.
1. Thoughtful, authentic responses
Research shows that candidate honesty is a significant concern in interviews—according to a 2023 ResumeLab survey, 8 in 10 candidates admitted to lying during job interviews. This is particularly problematic with common interview questions, as candidates often prepare polished but potentially inauthentic responses designed to impress interviewers.
Unique questions, on the other hand, push them to think deeper and reply in a way that genuinely reflects their perspective and shows who they are.
2. Insightful candidate assessment
How accurate your evaluation is determines your chances of hiring candidates who aren’t just job-proficient but also suit your organization.
Common interview questions assess at a broad, surface level only, but unique questions probe deeper for insight. Thus, you can hear how your candidates really think, giving you a better understanding of their abilities and helping you predict job success rates correctly.
3. To identify top talent
The quality of your workforce is a direct driver of business success. By using unique interview questions that test candidates’ analytical abilities, interpersonal skills, and problem-solving techniques in real-time, you can identify truly exceptional talent. These questions help you distinguish innovative thinkers from those who merely memorize standard responses, ensuring you build a team capable of driving your company forward.
4. Interactive interview experience
The candidate experience during interviews can make or break your hiring success. According to a 2024 CareerPlug report, 52% of job seekers have declined job offers specifically due to poor candidate experience, highlighting how crucial these interactions are. As one of the most personal touchpoints in the hiring process, interviews present a vital opportunity to showcase your company culture and build positive relationships with potential hires.
However, asking over-flogged questions throughout the interview creates a stiff atmosphere and prevents dynamic dialogue with the candidate. On the flip side, unique interview questions facilitate stimulating conversations that let candidates engage with you and demonstrate their ability, leading to a more interactive interview and by extension, a better candidate experience.
34 unique interview questions to ask candidates
Before drafting your questions and preparing your hiring script, study samples of similar questions to give you an idea of how to structure yours. In this section, we’ve provided a detailed list of 34 unique interview questions, including behavioral, leadership, and curveball questions.
Unique behavioral interview questions
An employee’s behavior is key to job success, and interviews should assess it critically. Unique behavioral questions reveal how candidates behave in specific situations, evaluating communication, interpersonal skills, problem-solving, and ethics.
Here are 10 such questions:
1. Describe a time you were applauded for your work and what you did to stand out.
2. Have personal values ever conflicted with a workplace decision? How did you respond?
3. What’s the most unconventional problem-solving tactic you’ve used so far?
4. Share an instance where saying “no” was the right choice. What was the outcome?
5. Have you ever disagreed with a majority decision on your team? How did you handle it?
6. What’s a habit you’ve developed that significantly improves your productivity?
7. Can you describe a situation where you were successful in an uphill task? How did you approach it?
8. Tell me about a time when you identified an opportunity or mistake that others overlooked.
9. What’s the most surprising feedback you’ve received about your work?
10. How do you share your ideas in a room full of strong personalities?
Unique situational interview questions
Before hiring a candidate, you should be able to predict their reaction to certain workplace scenarios and the resulting impact on their performance. Situational interview questions help with this, showing how they practically apply critical thinking and problem-solving tactics to challenges on the job.
Below are eight examples of these questions:
1. If our company announced a big leadership change, how would you adapt to it?
2. Imagine you’re given the task of improving team morale with a budget of $0. What would you do?
3. Suppose you’ve been assigned to lead a project with no formal authority over the team. How would you ensure success?
4. What would you do if you and your manager had opposite approaches to solving a problem?
5. If you discovered that you’ve consistently failed to meet targets, what steps would you take to restrategize?
6. Imagine a scenario where all your systems failed for a day. How would you ensure minimal disruption?
7. If you were tasked with doubling your team’s output in a month, how would you approach it?
8. What would you do if you were asked to represent the company in a critical meeting with no preparation?
Unique leadership and managerial interview questions
When you’re hiring for a leadership position or senior team member, you’ll want to know how your candidate leads and carries people along. Unique leadership interview questions test leadership capacity, encouraging candidates to share their experience and strategies they plan to implement when handling teams.
See 10 examples of these questions below:
1. If your team proposed multiple conflicting solutions to a problem, how would you decide which approach to adopt?
2. What would you do if one of your top team members suddenly drops in performance?
3. How do you foster trust among team members who don’t naturally get along?
4. If you had to implement an unpopular policy, how would you approach it?
5. Imagine your team’s workload doubled overnight. How would you prioritize and delegate tasks?
6. What’s the most effective way you’ve helped a struggling team member improve?
7. If your team missed a major milestone, how would you address it without discouraging them?
8. How would you foster innovation and creativity in a team with pre-established routines?
9. If you had to restructure your team in 24 hours, what criteria would you use to make decisions?
10. What do you hope to accomplish as a team leader?
Unique curveball interview questions
Curveball interview questions challenge candidates’ thinking with unexpected or out-of-the-box scenarios. With these questions, you’re assessing their adaptability and creativity, and how readily they can apply these skills. Here’s a list of six curveball questions to better understand how candidates think on their feet.
1. If you could write a book about your career, what would the title be and why?
2. If you were given one year to work on any project of your choice with unlimited resources, what would it be?
3. How would you explain your job to a five-year-old?
4. What do you believe about your job that most people would disagree with?
5. If you could time travel and give your younger self one piece of career advice, what would it be?
6. How would you redesign our interview process if you were in charge?
5 tips for using unique interview questions effectively
The results you get with unique interview questions largely depend on how you construct and structure your questions. Below, we’ll share five tips for using unique interview questions effectively and things you must avoid.
1. Avoid asking uncomfortable or inappropriate questions
While you can be liberal with your interview questions, you must be careful not to overstep your candidates’ boundaries. Asking invasive questions that have no relation to the job or its required skills can make them uncomfortable and throw them off course.
Additionally, it could introduce bias into your interview, especially with personal subjects like family life, politics, or religion. Stick strictly to questions that probe their critical thinking, creativity, and other job-related skills.
2. Tailor questions to the role
Every question on your hiring script should be directly relevant and test a required skill for the job. Avoid making questions outlandish or vague, as this prevents you from judging candidates’ possible job success quickly and accurately.
For example, a suitable marketing interview question would be: “With a limited budget, how would you structure your campaign to reach set marketing targets?”
3. Provide context for more difficult questions
With unique interview questions, candidates have to think precisely in little time, and this could seem intimidating. Providing context breaks difficult questions into simpler bits, showing them what you’re looking for and how it applies to the job. Besides easing their nerves, this approach ensures they fully understand your questions, helping them offer more meaningful responses.
4. Use open-ended questions
During interviews, focus on open-ended unique questions that ask candidates to share experiences or communicate their thoughts and processes. Rather than a curt “yes” or “no,” your questions should encourage descriptive or explanatory replies. This lets you into their mind, showing you how they think and, more importantly, how they communicate these thoughts and opinions to others.
5. Supplement with skill assessments
Unique interview questions are great for gauging creativity and problem-solving, but like other traditional recruitment methods, they fall short when used alone. Even with detailed hiring scripts and structured interviews, subconscious bias could very easily affect your hiring decision. This creates the need for additional objective hiring methods like skill assessment platforms.
Vervoe is one of the best hiring and recruitment software available, boasting powerful features for candidate assessment. Our vast assessment library contains over 300 assessments, flexible for testing across several roles while delivering trustworthy results.
With Vervoe, you can customize your tests to focus on the skills that your organization prioritizes and automatically grade candidates accordingly. You also get immersive job simulations that show you how candidates tackle realistic scenarios on the job.
To enhance the candidate experience, Vervoe offers comprehensive branding and personalization options that showcase your company culture and keep candidates engaged throughout the process. Overall, by combining our robust assessment features with unique interview questions, you can make precise, unbiased hiring decisions backed by reliable data.
Make confident hiring decisions with Vervoe
To assess candidates accurately, you need to channel your questions in the right direction, and unique interview questions help you achieve this. By structuring your questions creatively, you keep candidates engaged and get more honest and thoughtful replies than rehearsed ones. Coupled with reliable assessments, this interview strategy helps you identify and select the best candidates for your organization in no time.
Vervoe’s assessments are among the best on the market, comprehensively evaluating candidates on both technical and soft skills. From realistic job simulations to skill tests, we have everything you need to guide your hiring process and build a strong team.
Ready to give Vervoe a trial? Request a free demo and start making more confident hiring decisions today!