One of Our Most Predictive Interview Questions... Isn't a Question.

We spend a lot of time analyzing our interview process for outsourced inside sales roles. Every candidate goes through multiple sets of behavioral interviews, which are graded according to a strict rubric and routinely assessed for correlation to team member performance in our 'sales as a service' programs. 

One of our earliest team members noticed that - like many employers - we'd asked him towards the end of his interview if he had any questions for us. When he got the offer to join our team, he had a suggestion regarding the interview process he'd just been through.

"I was thinking...do you all score out the quality of candidate's questions?"

At the time, we didn't. But we knew even at the time that two qualities most predictive of strong SDRs in our organization were natural curiosity (after all, asking good, open-ended questions is a key part of the job) and enthusiasm for the position. Hypothetically, an individual who asks high-quality questions in the interview is more likely to have both traits.

Over the interim two year period, we introduced a grading mechanism for questions asked in our interview process that rewards candidates who ask well thought-out, non-logistical questions (for any candidates reading this - yes, this is a dead giveaway!). In our last review of our interview's statistics, we found that the 'questions question' has become one of the single most predictive areas of our interview process. Candidates who ask higher-quality questions (that is, questions that aren't purely logistical and are indicative of a natural curiosity about the role) tend to perform significantly better in our inside sales positions. Go figure.