Creating the structured interview using the SHL Set of Interview Questions

The structured interview is a key part of recruitment and selection. It helps us to know a lot about the candidate, and the candidate can also get to know the position and our organization. What can help us in achieving this is having predetermined questions. Research suggests that interviewers often fall into the trap of prejudice, which can lead to bad decisions. SHL’s Set of Interview Questions helps to recruit information about the candidate’s abilities in an organized way. The questions are based on SHL’s Universal Competency Framework (UCF) and measure 20 key competencies in 8 groups. To achieve the best result, it is advisable to use with the Universal Competency Report generated form SHL’s Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ). 

What competencies do the tests measure? You can find the whole list on our website, but we are introducing a few of them here:

1. Leadership and decision-making. Based on the answers to these questions, we can see how actively the candidate initiates, how fast and firmly he makes decisions, and how well he takes potential problems and risks into account, how much he can motivate others and if he sorrund himself with people who possess outstanding abilities.
2. Organizing and execution questions focus on how clearly he can determine goals, how effectively he plans ahead and how well he determines the resources needed to achieve these goals, how well he follows instructions and predetermined processes, how precise he is, and how involved he is in the organization.
3. Entrepreneurship and productivity. It focuses on factors like achieving work-related goals and business thinking; how interested the candidate is in positions with higher responsibility and power; how enthusiastic he is when faced with challenges; does he recognize his development areas; does he utilize training opportunities to develop; how up-to-date he is with competitors and market trends, how well he controls expenses; and does he think in categories of profit, loss and added value.
4. The group of connection making and presentation skills examines how the candidate develops relationships on every level of the hierarchy; how able he is to receive support with convincing, reasoning and parley; how clear he is able to communicate his opinions; how convincing and authentic of a presenter he is.

Measuring leaders’ and leader candidates’ competencies became one of the most important part of Human Resources in the 21st century. SHL’s Set of Interview Questions and its complementary Competency Cards can be a helpful tool for structured conversation focusing on identifying competencies.

The price of a Set of Interview Questions booklet is 20,000 HUF + VAT. In addition to the Set of Interview Questions, we recommend SHL Competency Cards to help identify and rank competencies. You can order via support [at] shl.hu ().