Strategic Job Interviews: How to Ask the Right Questions to Assess Motivation

Top candidates can have every technical skill on your list, but they also need soft skills, like self-motivation.

Although teams work as a group a lot of the time, there’s so much each employee must do on their own to complete projects without someone constantly over their shoulder making sure they do it. This is why motivation is so crucial. 

One of the best ways to gauge motivation in a candidate is in the interview process. You have an opportunity to interact with the candidates personally and ask them questions that reveal how motivated they are to succeed in the vacant position. 

But what exactly are those questions? And what else must you do to craft an interview process that helps you understand the motivation levels of potential employees? Keep reading for guidance on both. 

Get Your Interview Structure Down First 

Understanding a candidate’s self-motivation requires more than asking them, “How motivated are you to get this position?” You want to find out their true motivation levels, and that requires authenticity on their part. 

The thing is, getting someone to be completely honest in an interview isn’t easy. Many candidates tell interviewers what they think they want to hear rather than what is genuinely them. 

Being intentional about your interview structure and the atmosphere you want to create for the interviewee can help facilitate the comfort needed for them to be transparent. It also ensures you’re ready with the kinds of questions necessary to have a complete discussion about motivation. 

Ask questions related to their ability to do the job and their fit in your company culture. Open-ended and structured questions about motivation should be a part of your list during this time. For example, you could ask what motivation looks like to them and how they showed their motivation in their last position. You also may want to ask about how compensation and benefits factor into their motivation and describe some of the benefits your company offers.   

End the interview by asking if they have any questions for you. Pay careful attention to whether they have questions as well as the substance of their questions. Candidates who are more motivated to get the job and succeed tend to have more questions than those who aren’t motivated.  

Make notes about the following to craft an interview structure that gives you insight into who the candidate is and how motivated they are: 

• How will you introduce yourself?

• What will your first set of questions be? 

• When will you ask questions about motivation? What will those questions be?

• What final questions will you ask?

• What’s the maximum interview time?

• How will you make the candidate feel comfortable?

Ultimately, there should be a flow to your interview that allows the candidate to open up to you so that by the time you get to the questions about motivation, they’ll be more likely to answer genuinely. 

Questions to Ask That Help Flesh Out Motivation

You know how you want the interview to proceed, generally. However, the goal is to figure out how motivated the candidate is. So, now, the question is, what do you ask to probe for intrinsic motivation? Start with a question related to work-from-home readiness. 

Although remote work existed before the pandemic, it accelerated the rate at which workers perform their duties from home or in a hybrid format. Despite what many people may think, working from home isn’t easy. There are a lot of distractions at home, like kids, television, and domestic duties calling your name. In this context, both employees and employers have to put in the effort to boost team morale. 

Not only that, there’s no one watching a remote work employee to ensure they get their work done. It’s up to them what they get done, how they get it done, and how much they get done. 

So, by asking an employee how they handled working from home, you can get a sense of their motivation level. For example, if a candidate says it was hard to get work done but they managed it, this may not be a response indicative of high motivation. 

On the other hand, if a candidate told you specific numbers went up because of the projects they completed during their remote work stint, and that they stayed on top of their mental and physical health to be able to stay productive and engaged, you’d conclude that they’re highly self-motivated. 

Working from home, especially during the pandemic, was and is challenging. So, if an employee can prove they were able to thrive through it, that’s a good sign. 

The following questions can also help you understand a candidate’s motivation: 

• What passion projects are you working on?

• How do you plan on contributing to the team?

• How do you see your professional development unfolding in this role?

• Talk about a time you completed a project you weren’t excited about.

• Aside from the compensation and technical skill development, why do you want this position?

Properly Assess Candidates and Their Responses 

Asking good motivation-related questions and avoiding filler questions is only part of interview success. The other part is attentively listening to responses and assessing candidates properly based on them. The first step is removing any biases you have. Everyone deserves a fair assessment, and you can’t do that if you’re biased. 

Next, you should have pre-hire indicators in place to determine the quality of the hire. In this case, it would be metrics that tell you how motivated a candidate is based on their responses to your interview questions. 

This requires a system for quantifying the estimated level of self-motivation. For instance, you could attach points to a response based on its depth or keywords the candidate uses in their responses. 

At the end of the day, listening to the response is just as important as asking the right questions. 

Let the above tips assist you in conducting strategic interviews that leave you knowing whether a candidate is highly motivated or not.