Libby Sartain is an independent advisor, working with companies on human resource issues. She has worked in human resources for more than 30 years and is also an author and public speaker. She uses her HR leadership and management experience from companies in technology, transportation, and manufacturing in her writing and speaking. She led human resources at Yahoo! and Southwest Airlines during transformative periods. Both companies were among Fortune magazineâs âBest Places to Workâ during her tenure. She is on the board of Manpower Group and used to be chair of the Society for Human Resource Management’s board. She is also vice chair of the AARP board.
Interviews with candidates are often the main way that hiring decisions are made. They are also one of the best ways to increase your chances of hiring A-players. There are two important parts to a best-practice interviewing process: making it clear what you want in a top candidate and making sure that all of the interviewers give you information that you can use.
Studies show that unstructured, “seat-of-the-pants” interviews, which is what employees will do if they don’t get any good advice, are about as good as flipping a coin at telling if a candidate is likely to be an A-player or a C-player.
Geoff Smart, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Who?, says that the first mistake people make when they hire someone is not being clear on what they want them to do. âYou may have some vague notion of what you want. It’s likely that other people on your team have similarly vague ideas about what you need and want. â.
Too often, hiring managers rely on what Smart callas âvoodoo hiring. â They cling to their favorite methods, even when evidence suggests those methods donât work.
a½Our research and experience show that hiring people is still seen as something that can’t be done in a structured way, even though every other management process has been studied and written down, Smart writes. His research has uncovered this list of the top 10 voodoo hiring methods:
Any company can benefit immediately by following a consistent, well-designed interview process that covers all types of jobs. This can be done with a scorecard or an interview feedback form that is used by everyone in the company, no matter the job or interview style.
If your interview process is the same for all jobs, the next step is to make a scorecard that is specific to the job you’re hiring for. This technique has a proven 90 percent success record at predicting success in the role. The most effective interviewing technique involves using job- and role-specific behavioral questionnaires.
Using a standard feedback form makes sure that all interviewers know what is expected of them ahead of time. It also helps interviewers avoid using vague attitudes or opinions as the reason for recommending or rejecting a candidate. It’s easier to compare feedback from different interviewers when you give them all the same questions or sections to answer.
Everyone wants to know how Southwest Airlines hired the most customer-service-focused workers in the airline business. The simple answer is that we set up a way to find candidates who were a good fit for the project. It started at the top of the organization. Hiring people was a top priority for our executive leadership team, and our CEO told all departments that they had to follow the steps set up by our People Department (HR) to find and hire candidates.
We used behavioral-based interviewing for all job segments. Before hiring, a group figured out the five to seven most important behavioral traits for each job role and came up with specific interview questions based on the candidates’ past actions, tasks, and outcomes. Southwest believed that past behavior was the best and strongest indicator of future behavior.
We didn’t ask people about the technical side of the job during interviews; the resume would tell us if they had the right rating, hours of flight, mechanical license, programming language, or accounting skills. We paid more attention to how someone worked with others, whether they were a servant leader who put the needs of others first, and how they handled a crisis.
Southwest trained hiring managers and peers in these interviewing techniques and the hiring panel would recommend hiring. HR would check references and the person’s background, and then a different group would decide who to hire based on all the information they had.
Getting hired at ClearCompany can be a competitive process. As a leading talent management software company, they likely receive many strong applicants for open roles. Acing your ClearCompany interview is crucial to stand out from other candidates.
In this article, we’ll cover the top 20 most common ClearCompany interview questions, examples of strong responses, and tips to help you prepare.
Overview of the ClearCompany Hiring Process
The typical ClearCompany interview process consists of:
- Initial phone screening
- 1-3 in-person interviews with various team members
- Possible presentation or skills assessment
The interviews are conversational but aim to evaluate your skills, experience, and cultural fit. The process can move quickly for some candidates but take longer for others.
Clear communication and feedback are not always consistent. However, being prepared can help you progress smoothly through the stages.
20 Common ClearCompany Interview Questions and Answers
Here are some of the most frequently asked ClearCompany interview questions. along with examples of strong responses
1. How would you approach building and maintaining long-term relationships with potential clients in a highly competitive market?
Strong relationships in a crowded marketplace require personalization, trust, and consistent value Tailor communication and solutions to each client’s needs Regular check-ins and feedback loops ensure you adapt as their priorities shift. Highlighting your commitment to service excellence can differentiate you amidst tough competition.
2. Describe your experience with implementing complex solutions for diverse client needs. How do you ensure successful adoption and integration?
Walk through a specific example that displays your expertise in customizing and deploying multifaceted solutions. Discuss how you engaged stakeholders, conducted training, provided support, and tracked metrics to facilitate adoption. Emphasize your focus on aligning solutions with evolving client requirements through continuous improvement.
3. Can you discuss a time when you had to negotiate a sales deal that involved multiple stakeholders? What was the outcome?
Share a deal where you mapped the stakeholder landscape and met with each party to understand their distinct interests. Explain how you brought differing needs together into an integrated proposal and facilitated collaborative discussions to reach consensus. Conclude with the positive result, showing your competence in high-stakes negotiations.
4. Explain how you measure success within customer success management and provide an example of how you’ve improved customer satisfaction.
Articulate your approach to quantifiable goal-setting and tracking metrics like NPS and CSAT. Provide a concrete instance where customer feedback led you to implement a targeted solution that measurably boosted satisfaction and retention. Showcase your commitment to continuous improvement.
5. Describe a challenging support issue you resolved, and explain how you ensured the client left the interaction positively.
Highlight your technical expertise by outlining a complex issue you successfully diagnosed and resolved. Emphasize the communication techniques you used to maintain transparency during the process. Share how your follow-up and debrief with the client reinforced trust and satisfaction.
6. Discuss a software project where you contributed significantly to its development; what coding languages did you use, and how did it address the user’s problem?
Outline the scope, your specific contributions, and technologies leveraged. Explain the user problem solved through your work. Reflect on collaborating with the team and overcoming any obstacles faced. Demonstrate both your technical capabilities and user-focused approach.
7. Give an example of how you’ve proactively identified a customer’s unspoken needs and turned them into actionable insights.
Share a specific time your intuition uncovered a latent customer need, such as spotting patterns signaling issues with a product workflow. Detail the steps taken to address the need and the resulting boost in customer satisfaction. Showcase your analytical abilities and customer-centric mindset.
8. Walk me through how you manage a portfolio of accounts to maximize both client success and company revenue.
Systematically assess each account’s needs, challenges, and potential. Create tailored nurturing and upselling strategies per client. Set clear metrics for success
Assess their ability to solve a problem.
If you were hiring a chef, you would ask them to cook a meal. Having a job applicant do some of the actual work is the best way to tell the difference between good candidates and average ones. Consider asking them to identify problems on the job. Say something like, “Please walk me through the steps of the process you’ll use in your first weeks to find the most important problems or chances in your area right now.” â Or ask the candidate to solve a current problem. The ability to solve current problems is often the number one predictive factor of job performance. Provide them with a description of an actual problem they will face on their first day. Then ask them to walk you through the broad steps they would take to solve the problem. Prior to the interview, make a list of the essential steps. Take away points if they skip important steps like collecting data, talking to the team or customer, and coming up with success metrics. Identify the problems in the process. Hand them a single-page description of a flawed existing process related to their job. Request that they look over the process and name the three most likely places where major issues will arise. Prior to the interview, make a list of those pain points and flaws.
Five Specific Benefits of a Standardized Interview Feedback Form
- It allows for different interview styles. *
- It brings hiring managers, team leaders, and others involved in the hiring and talent development process on the same page. * .
- It ensures legal compliance. *
- It uses a more fair set of facts to base each interviewee’s feedback. * .
- It provides guidance to less-experienced interviewers. *
To learn more about methods of interviewing, see Interview Considerations at the end of this article.
How to Answer Behavioral Interview Questions Sample Answers
FAQ
Does ClearCompany drug test?
What questions should be asked in a pre-placement talk?
What is a good interview question?
18. “Tell me about a time when you took a calculated risk, and it was successful.” Interviewers can use this question to gauge how confident the candidate is in making hard decisions and if those decisions paid off for them in the past. It’s also a great practical interview question for gauging potential leadership skills. 19.
How do you answer a practical interview question?
1. “Can you explain how you would tackle a relevant work-related problem step by step?” When you ask this practical interview question, you can use an example of a recent issue your team has run into. That tells you if you can expect the candidate to bring out-of-the-box solutions to the table. 2.
Why do employers ask practical interview questions?
It’s an opportunity for the interviewer and the candidate to get to know each other and establish whether or not the candidate is a good fit for the job. Employers can get to know a candidate’s background and skills by asking practical interview questions.
What information should you ask a candidate before a job interview?
Based on their answer, you’ll learn some useful information upfront, like where the candidate’s strengths lie, responsibilities that they’ll be excited to take on, and what they value in company culture. You can also spot some red flags by asking this question.
