Administrative | McCormick Institute Early Childhood

Getting Ready to Hire? Make Sure You’re Asking the Right Questions

By Robyn Kelton • June 9, 2026

Making a hiring decision can be nerve-wracking. Whether you have several strong candidates or a less-than-ideal applicant pool, you still have to determine the best fit based on very limited information. Applications, resumes, and references are essential parts of the evaluation process because they provide important background and can help narrow the field. But many candidates look impressive on paper… For that reason, the interview is arguably your best opportunity to determine whom to hire. Yet many of us were never formally trained in best practices for interviewing a potential employee; instead, we are left to figure out which questions will offer the clearest glimpse into a candidate’s competency, personality, and commitment. This can result in asking questions that are not relevant, or that have obvious, socially desirable answers about what a candidate would do in a situation, but that don’t actually reveal what they did do in similar circumstances. A few years ago, I developed the training Recruitment and Hiring: Finding the Needle in the Haystack (see the description and link in the Session Spotlight box). While creating that session, I spent a lot of time reading research in organizational psychology and human resources, and in the process discovered a great deal about the science behind effective interview questions. Below, I describe two of my biggest takeaways about interview questions.