Here’s a hard truth: generic interview questions, however convenient, rarely reveal whether candidates can truly deliver results. The interview is your opportunity to identify which candidate can drive impact in your specific context—navigating your organization’s unique challenges and resource constraints. Standard questions simply won’t give you the right insights to make an accurate assessment. But there is a better way.

Through decades of helping clients hire transformational leaders, we’ve developed an approach that ensures interviews get at the heart of what drives impact in a role. Here are the strategies that work for us.

Start With the End in Mind

Before thinking about the questions you might ask, define what success means in the role. What are the tangible business results you expect? How does this role drive your mission forward? Identify concrete outcomes (not just activities) and include metrics for how success will be measured. Get clear on your performance expectations for the first one to two years.

Consider the day-to-day work. What will be their top priorities? What is the scale and scope of the work? What resources will they have access to? What potential roadblocks will they have to navigate?

Based on the expected results, impact, and day-to-day work, identify the 3-5 job competencies someone would need to be successful (think about functional “hard” skills and job-relevant soft skills). Be as specific as possible with each competency. For example, rather than “strong leadership skills,” specify “the ability to build consensus and drive initiatives forward when managing staff and volunteers with competing priorities.”

Once you define each competency with job-relevant details, you can develop targeted questions around them.

Note: For our client searches, we take this several steps further. We conduct extensive role research, including stakeholder interviews and market analysis, to uncover hidden opportunities and challenges. We also give promising candidates writing prompts based on the defined key competencies, which often surface additional topics for deeper discussion. We recognize that few hiring teams have the resources for this depth of research, but even a focused hour spent defining results and impact will dramatically improve your interviews.

Structure Your Interviews for Productive Conversations

We recommend that you prepare a set of questions to use with every candidate (a structured interview approach). This keeps the conversation focused on the key competencies required to drive impact and enables you to gather consistent, comparable insights. This approach also reduces the natural tendency to steer the conversation toward familiar topics (which can unintentionally introduce bias) and helps you evaluate candidates more fairly.

Frame your questions around specific challenges candidates might face in your organization. You want to learn whether the candidate understands the context of the role, demonstrates transferable skills, can add to your team, and is prepared to solve the problems they will face on the job.

Here are a few examples of competency-driven questions that address specific challenges:

  • “We often need to demonstrate impact to multiple audiences—from funders to community members to board members. Can you share an experience where you had to translate complex program outcomes for different stakeholders? What approaches did you take?”
  • “Our next strategic plan calls for doubling our impact while maintaining program quality. Tell me about a time you’ve managed rapid scaling. What specific challenges did you face?”
  • “We’re a small team where everyone needs to flex between strategic thinking and hands-on implementation. Describe a situation where you had to navigate these different modes of working.”
  • “Share a situation where you had to balance competing stakeholder needs. What trade-offs did you consider, and how did you reach your decisions?”

Prepare Strategic Follow-Ups

The best follow-up questions flow naturally from what the candidate has shared while giving you more information about their previous work environment and how they approach the work. Focus your follow-up questions in these key areas:

  • Probe for Specific Actions: “How did you achieve that success?” This gets beyond the “what” to understand exactly how a candidate approaches challenges.
  • Clarify Scope and Scale: “What was your role on the team, and what resources did you manage?” This reveals whether someone has led complex work or simply participated in it. It also helps you get a sense of scale.
  • Understand Decision-Making: “Walk me through a key decision you made during that project. What factors did you consider?” This shows how candidates analyze situations and weigh trade-offs.
  • Explore Continuous Learning: “What would you do differently if you faced that situation today?” This reveals self-awareness and adaptability. Top-performing candidates often share thoughtful reflections about both successes and setbacks.
  • Investigate Impact: “How did you know your approach was working?” This helps you evaluate whether candidates can connect their actions to meaningful outcomes and metrics.

Don’t Overlook the Value of a Work Sample Test

Once you’ve conducted structured interviews and identified 2-3 finalists, give them a work sample test. A well-designed work sample can reveal insights that even the best interview questions might miss. You would be surprised how this additional perspective can change your view of a candidate’s abilities. For guidance on creating effective work samples, including examples from real searches, read How Work Sample Tests Help You Hire Better.

Focused Interviews Are Attractive to Top Performers

Your interviews should reflect your investment in a fair and in-depth hiring process. Top-performing candidates want to understand the real challenges of the role and how their skills could drive meaningful impact. They don’t want to answer generic questions any more than you want to hear generic answers. When you are thorough and targeted in your questions, both you and the candidate will be prepared to make a well-informed decision when the time comes.

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