Best Interview Questions to Identify Top Talent

Over more than 25 years in the staffing industry, I've interviewed thousands of candidates across IT, Engineering, and Life Sciences, and I’ve learned what separates hiring processes that consistently identify strong performers from ones that could produce expensive mismatches.

The best interviews all share a common trait: they're built from a specific understanding of what success looks like in the role, paired with the ability to read how a candidate thinks in real time. Most hiring managers, through no fault of their own, haven't had the training or repetition to develop that instinct. Interviewing is a small slice of their job. For those of us in workforce solutions, it's the whole job.

It’s worth getting right, because the cost of misfires is inflating. Gallup estimates that replacing a technical professional costs roughly 80% of that person's annual salary; for managers and leaders, the figure can climb to 200%. Those costs trace back to a hiring decision. The quality of your questions, structure, and your ability to evaluate answers all directly impact whether you're building the best teams, or rebuilding to fix mistakes.

Below, I'll walk through the question types, process decisions, and evaluation habits that I've seen move hiring from guesswork to a repeatable system.

Why the interview carries more weight now

Resumes have always required a degree of interpretation, but the gap between what a resume shows and what a candidate can actually deliver has widened considerably. According to Kelly's (Dis)honest Job Search survey, 79% of job seekers now use AI tools in their applications, and 66% of hiring managers use AI-detection software to screen them. Both sides have largely accepted this as the new normal. Our survey also found that 63% of candidates and 67% of hiring managers say AI-assisted applications are ethical.

The practical effect is that more candidates than ever look qualified on paper. I see this regularly: an employer posts a role and is immediately flooded with hundreds of applicants whose resumes have been tailored by AI to mirror the job description almost verbatim, a process which takes most candidates just minutes. That means the interview is where hiring managers can distinguish between candidates who could probably do a job and candidates who would be the best at it.

Meanwhile, the skills employers need are shifting faster than credentials can keep up. Kelly's 2025 Re:work Report found that 65% of global executives are moving toward skills-based hiring, and 42% of global high-skill workers say their current roles don't actually require a college degree. When the gap between what a credential signals and what a job actually demands is that wide, the interview is where capability can actually be evaluated.

How to differentiate a strong potential performer versus someone who’s just a strong interviewer

Before getting into specific questions, it helps to know what you're listening for. There's often a meaningful difference between a candidate who just interviews well and a potential top performer,and it tends to show up in three places.

• The specificity of the candidate’s answers. Competent-seeming candidates can describe what a technical process is, why it matters, or how it might be applied. That's fine. But the strongest candidates go a layer further and describe what they individually did: how they applied a concept in a real situation, and what the results of that work were, ideally with numbers attached.

• The conversational quality of the dialogue. For any role that involves communication, collaboration, or client interaction, the interview is a preview of how that person will operate on the job. The best candidates reference something you spontaneously discussed five minutes ago, ask follow-up questions, and adjust their framing based on the conversation. That responsiveness is hard to fake and tends to carry over directly into how someone collaborates on the job.

• The level of confidence in the answers. Or, what I call “the projection test.” As the interviewer, ask yourself how this conversation would translate to the actual job. The interview should mirror what the job actually demands, and not every role demands the same kind of presence. If the role requires leading a team, presenting to clients, or managing stakeholders, the way a candidate carries themselves in the interview is a legitimate preview. But if you're hiring for a role that rewards deep focus, technical precision, or independent problem-solving, the signals worth watching are different: clarity of thinking, how they work through complexity, and whether their answers demonstrate rigor.

Four types of questions that best predict performance

A lot of interview advice focuses on which specific questions to ask. That matters, but not as much as what’s caused you to ask them.. Over the course of my career, my most effective interview questions usually fall into one of four categories.

Questions built from the role's success metrics

Start with the top few things success would look like in this job and craft questions for each, tailored to that candidate's experience. If someone has done the work before, ask them to walk you through the process they followed and results they achieved. If a candidate lacks direct experience in a particular area (and that's okay, nobody has everything) shift the conversation towards transferable skills. What have they done that's comparable, and what specifically would make you believe they can grow into this part of the role?

Questions about skills development and adaptability

Behavioral interview questions (think "tell me about a time when…" ) are still a useful starting point. That said, the best interviews also cover how a candidate has grown, especially recently. How have they added to their skill set in the past year or two? In an environment where AI is reshaping how work gets done, a candidate's ability to self-educate, adapt, and seek out people who can teach and mentor them matters as much as what they already know. A study published in the Journal of Business Research found that questions grounded in behavior, situational judgment, and professional background all significantly predicted job performance, while abstract or purely knowledge-based questions did not.

Non-traditional questions that test spontaneity

One question I always ask towards the end of an interview, regardless of the role or level, is: "Tell me something that we should know about you that is not on your résumé or your LinkedIn profile." Then I stop talking. Candidates will usually ask for clarification ("Does it have to be about the job?") and I tell them “no rules to this answer” — it's their show. I've gotten some of the most fascinating responses about people's passions, quirks, beliefs, and what gets them out of bed in the morning. I've also gotten answers that told me this person can't think on their feet. Unlike abstract questions (“if you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?”) this one still tests spontaneity, but within a framework where a good candidate should be able to sell themselves.

Questions candidates ask you

This is the other area where I often learn the most. When I open the floor, I'm listening for how thoughtful, prepared, and tailored their questions are, both to the specific job and the conversation we've just had. A candidate who says "Tell me about a typical day" or "How do you measure success?" is asking something that could apply to any role at any company in history. A candidate who says "I noticed this in the job description and I want to learn more about how you're measuring success for it” or “Here’s something I’ve done that’s similar, is that what you're looking for?" is showing forethought, specificity, and a level of engagement that tells me as much as any answer they've given.

Questions employers should stop asking

Two categories of questions still show up in interviews far more often than they should.

Questions that create legal and compliance exposure. It's surprising how frequently this still happens. Questions about salary history are increasingly illegal at the state and municipal level. Questions about family and personal status, and other protected categories have been off-limits for much longer. Yet many companies still put interviewers in front of candidates without adequate training on these boundaries. When more than 80% of people involved in hiring have had little or no formal interview training, this kind of exposure is both predictable and preventable.

Questions that project too far into the future. The classic "where do you see yourself in 10 years?" is a question I’ve always made fun of, and I stand by that. The world is changing fast enough that none of us can answer it with any realism, and it's especially absurd for junior candidates who are still figuring out their direction, or for shorter contracts, where the role’s time horizon doesn't even reach the time horizon of the question. The instinct behind it is sound: target career direction and personal ambitions, both of which are valuable. But the boilerplate version of that question belongs in the history books. Ask more pointedly about goals and motivations, instead of inviting a fiction about the next decade.

How to structure the process without losing candidates

The best interview questions on the planet won't help if the process around them is broken. A few principles I come back to consistently:

Keep it to three stages or fewer

When an interview process stretches beyond that, it usually means stakeholders disagree on what success looks like, and that indecision is visible to candidates. Lengthy processes are a particular liability for companies that don't have top-tier name recognition, as well as those in competition for the most in-demand candidates. The more drawn-out and indecisive you are, the harder it becomes to land the people you actually want.

Create a consistent baseline

Every candidate should encounter the same core process and evaluation criteria. Conversations will naturally reflect different backgrounds and experiences, but a consistent underlying structure gives everyone an equal opportunity to demonstrate their fit. It also protects you. Research consistently shows that structured interviews are roughly twice as predictive of job performance as unstructured ones.

Watch for assumptions that eliminate good candidates

There are two patterns on this one that I see regularly. The first is dismissing someone because they're not currently employed, without asking about context; some gaps exist for good reasons. The second is overvaluing credentials like a prestigious degree from years ago, with less focus on what that person has done since. In a market where skills change fast, what someone can do now often matters more than where they studied ten years ago.

Build a better interview with the right partner

Most hiring managers don't interview for a living. It might be item 48 of 50 things on their plate in a given week. For a workforce solutions partner like Kelly, it's what we do, across IT, Engineering, Life Sciences, and dozens of other specialties. That volume builds pattern recognition that's difficult to develop any other way. Kelly's recruiters know what strong candidates look like in a given field, how the market is shifting, and where you stand relative to your competitors.

Employers who get the most from that partnership invest as little as 30 minutes at the start of a hiring process to go beyond the job description: what does success really look like, what have you struggled with in the past, what would make someone stand out? That context is what allows a workforce solutions partner to move past resume matching and deliver top performers. In a market flooded with AI-polished applications, that distinction matters more than ever.