Interview question kit

Interview Question Kit

Turn a role's competencies into a fair, comparable question set with per-question scoring anchors, so interviewers assess evidence instead of rapport. The costly mistake this prevents is the unstructured loop: five interviewers improvising different questions, scoring on likability, producing scorecards that cannot be compared - which is how teams hire the best storyteller instead of the best candidate, and how legally risky questions slip in.

Operating procedure

Order matters: questions written before the competency map exist to sound clever, not to gather evidence.

Step 1: Gather the rubric

Collect the role's defined, job-relevant competencies and their weights, plus the job description, loop size (how many interviewers, how long each session), and seniority level. If no rubric exists, derive 4-6 competencies from the job description, label them as derived, and confirm them before writing a single question. Never write a question that does not map to a competency on this list.

Step 2: Allocate competencies across the loop

Assign each competency to one or two interviewers who probe it deeply, rather than every interviewer skimming all of them - overlap wastes candidate time and produces shallow, redundant evidence. Write 2-3 items per competency.

Step 3: Write behavioral items in STAR form

Ask for specific past situations ("Tell me about a time you shipped under a hard deadline with incomplete requirements"), not hypotheticals - past behavior is evidence; hypotheticals are performance. For each item, list follow-up probes that separately pull out Situation, Task, Action, and Result, because candidates default to narrating the team's work instead of their own. The probe "What did you do, specifically?" earns its place in every kit.

Step 4: Add a role-specific work sample

Pair behavioral items with a short, realistic job task: a design discussion, a code reading, a mock customer email, a prioritization exercise. Keep it role-true, time-boxed, and identical across candidates. At least one work-sample item per loop.

Step 5: Write strong/borderline/red-flag anchors for every item

Spell out what a strong answer demonstrates, what a borderline answer looks like, and the red flags - tied to the competency, not to likability. Anchors are what make two interviewers' scores comparable.

Step 6: Standardize delivery

Specify question order, time budget per item, and which follow-ups are allowed, so the same role gets the same loop every time. A 45-60 minute session realistically fits 3-4 behavioral items with probes, or 2 items plus a work sample - more than that produces surface answers.

Step 7: Screen for compliance

Remove or rewrite any item a candidate could reasonably read as probing a protected characteristic: age, family or marital status, pregnancy, religion, disability, health, national origin - and salary history where restricted. Do this as a final pass on the full set, because risky questions often emerge from innocent-sounding "culture" items.

Worked artifact: one kit entry (copy this structure per item)

COMPETENCY: Ownership under ambiguity (weight: 25%)
INTERVIEWER: [FILL: name] - Session 2 of 4 (45 min; this item: 12 min)

QUESTION (behavioral, STAR):
"Tell me about a time you were handed a project with unclear requirements
and a fixed deadline. Walk me through what happened."

PROBES (use as needed, in order):
- Situation: "What was the context - team size, what was at stake?"
- Task: "What specifically were you responsible for, versus the team?"
- Action: "What did YOU do first? What did you decide not to do?"
- Result: "How did it land? What would you do differently?"

ANCHORS:
- Strong: names the ambiguity explicitly, describes how they scoped or
  de-risked it themselves (stakeholder alignment, cutting scope, spike),
  owns a concrete personal action, states a measurable result AND a lesson.
- Borderline: real story but narrates the team's work; result stated
  without their causal role; needed every probe to surface specifics.
- Red flag: hypothetical answer despite redirection; blames others for the
  ambiguity; cannot name a single decision they personally made.

SCORE: 1 (red flag) / 2 (borderline) / 3 (strong) - record evidence quotes, not impressions.

A full kit repeats this block for every item, prefaced by a one-page loop plan: competency-to-interviewer matrix, session order, and time budgets.

Deliverable

Produce the complete kit: a competency-to-interviewer allocation matrix, 2-3 items per competency in the block format above (each with STAR probes and all three anchors), at least one work-sample exercise with its own anchors, and delivery notes (order, time budgets, allowed follow-ups). The kit is the input to scorecards - not a hire recommendation.

Do NOT

• Do NOT generate questions touching age, family or marital status, pregnancy, religion, disability, health, national origin, or salary history where restricted - these create legal exposure regardless of intent.
• Do NOT write hypothetical "what would you do" questions where a past-behavior or work-sample item would yield real evidence.
• Do NOT allow free-form, candidate-specific tangents that break comparability across candidates.
• Do NOT assess anything outside the defined, job-relevant competencies - "culture fit" without a defined competency is bias with a nicer name.
• Do NOT issue a verdict, ranking, or hire/no-hire call; the panel decides, and the kit only informs that decision.
• Do NOT overload a session - more than 4 behavioral items in 45 minutes guarantees shallow answers on all of them.

Quality bar

• Every question traces to exactly one competency on the rubric; no orphan questions.
• Every question has all three anchors (strong, borderline, red flag), each tied to the competency.
• At least one work-sample item per loop, identical across candidates.
• The loop is reproducible: another interviewer could run it identically from the kit alone.
• The compliance pass is done on the final set, and derived competencies are labeled as derived.

Escalation and neighbors

This kit is not legal advice; for roles in regulated industries, unionized environments, or jurisdictions with strict interview law, have HR or employment counsel review the final set. Upstream, build the rubric with hiring-scorecard or screening-rubric-builder and the posting with job-description-writer (bias-check it with jd-bias-scrubber). Downstream, consolidate completed scorecards with interview-debrief-synthesizer. For user-research interviews - a different craft with different rules - use interview-guide-builder.