Will They Do the Job? Measuring Candidate Attitude

Following a steady rise over the last decade, employee engagement decreased globally by two percentage points, from 22% in 2019 to 20% in 2020, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2021 Report.

Leaders will need to address this decline and the business impact on workplace culture, employee retention and performance. When it comes to hiring, measuring candidate attitude is essential to assess your candidates willingness to do the job and how enthusiastically they will approach their work.

Personal Qualities

What are the personal qualities that influence how a candidate will engage with their job and your company? Let’s explore some of the questions that will get the candidate to reveal their inner drive:

What have you done that you're proud of?
How do you feel about your career progress to date?
How do you rank yourself compared to your peers?
What personal qualities do you think are necessary to succeed in this job?
Tell me about a project that really got you excited.
Tell me about a responsibility in that project that you enjoyed.
What did you do to meet that responsibility?
Do you consider yourself successful?

Working Well with Others

With more and more people working remotely, teamwork is vital in almost every position. Examining your candidate’s willingness to work effectively as a team member is a strong indicator of their future success.

How do you see your role as a group member?
In working with new people, how do you go about getting an understanding of them?
Are you able to anticipate their behavior based on your reading of them?
Tell me about a time when you needed to understand another’s situation to get your job done.
Tell me about a specific accomplishment you have achieved as a group member.
Have you worked with a group like this before? What was your role?
How did you handle conflict and disagreements when they would arise?
What type of person to get along with best?
What types of people do you find it difficult to get along with?
What difficulties do you have tolerating people with different backgrounds and interests?

Problem-Solving

One of the most important attributes of any candidate is their willingness to confront problems and challenges and resolve them with a positive attitude. This is a topic you will want to address directly in your screening and interview process.

Do you deal with complex problems in your current job?
What are some of the things you find difficult to do?
What kind of decisions are most difficult for you?
Tell me about a job or project where you had to gather information from different sources and then create something with the information.
How do you organize and plan for major projects?
Tell me about an occasion when in difficult circumstances you pulled the team together.
Tell me about a time when the team fell apart. Why did it happen? What did you do?
Tell me about a time you had to build motivation or team spirit with coworkers.

Achievement Orientation

Candidate aspirations will tell you a great deal about their willingness to do the job for your organization.

Do you set goals for yourself?
What did you like about your last/current job
What did you dislike about your last/current job?
How many projects can you handle at a time?
On a typical day for me, what problems do you often experience getting things done?
Describe a project that required a high energy over an extended period of time.
What did you do to keep your enthusiasm throughout the project?
When you have a great deal of work to do that requires extra effort, how do you find the energy?
How many hours a week do you find it necessary to work to get your job done?

Initiative

Initiative is the power or opportunity to act or take charge before others do. How will you measure your candidates’ initiative?

Tell me about a method you've developed to consistently complete your work.
Tell me about a time when you came up with a new idea. How did you get it approved?
How do you handle it when your ideas are rejected and not approved?
What's the most difficult situation you faced that was stressful. How did you handle it?
When you've been in difficult situations, what professional skills do you commit to improve?
Tell me about an occasion when your performance didn't live up to your own expectations.

Personal Vision

What does your candidate see for themselves and their future with the company? It’s best to find out now when screening or interviewing rather than to learn they expect to move on to another chapter of their lives in the near future.

What have you done to become more effective in your position?
How long will it take you to make a contribution with us?
How long do you plan to stay with the company?
Are you willing to go where the company sends you?
How would working evenings affect you?
How would travel affect you?
How do you define a successful career?
Is this the type of career you want for yourself? Why?

About HireQuotient

At HireQuotient, our AI-powered business skills assessments help you assess your candidate’s ability, willingness and manageability to fill your position and perform exceptionally.

Our chatbot-powered skill assessments are built around realistic work scenarios, ensuring candidates answer structured questions based on the provided data and generate insights into each candidate’s job-specific skills and business competencies.

In addition, our powerful, simple and easy-to-use dashboards allow you to create customized workflows for effortless operations, view detailed analytics for making data-driven decisions and seamlessly integrate into your existing candidate automation flow.

Learn more about how HireQuotient can help your organization power up your people analytics. Just visit to schedule a demo today!