Probing Techniques

Effective interviews depend on well-thought out and well-structured questions, with good mixture of various types like Open, closed, multiple, leading, hypothetical, behavioural, reflective and probing questions.

Probing are follow-up question generally comes after the open questions. Probing works far better than having scripted question, since it is rare that a candidate will give you all the required information from your lead question. The questions should be short, simple, and in past tense. “Can you give me example?” or “What did you do?” or “What was the outcome?”

According to Richard Boyatzis a competency is defined as “an underlying characteristic of an individual which is causally related to effective or superior performance.” Once you have defined the competencies you need for a role, you can use simple question structures to probe them.

Probing Techniques:

Repeating:  If candidate is going off the track and keeps explaining around the subject and not very specific to the question repeat the question will help to get better evidence of subject understanding.

Hinting: Interviewer gives the hints while probing "Is this something like...." which will help candidate to start.

Rearranging: Interviewer rearranges his question for better understanding of the candidate so that the candidate understands it better and starts talking on that.

Explanation: Interviewer can ask more explanations or examples to probe the understanding of certain area to the candidate.

Silence: If candidate is taking time or hesitates the interviewer maintains the science so that the candidate breaks science.

Start again: when candidate keeps silent interviewer can start the discussion with questions like "what else you can think of?"

Probing should not have inappropriate closed questions like after the candidates answers should not ask "did you really....?" and multiple questions at once or not related questions to the job requirements should be avoided.