5 Great Interview Questions for Hiring in Child and Youth Organisations

Most of us aren’t in HR.  We are managers and team leaders looking to recruit staff for our team and program.  We haven’t been trained in recruitment and honestly – it can be a nightmare.  Sometimes you get inundated with applications and it is hard to short-list.  At other times, no one applies.  As for the actual interviews – you lose a whole day of work and it can be exhausting!

That is why you want to get the right person in the door – so you don’t have to do it again too soon!  It can also save you a lot of time later as you won’t be caught up in things like performance management. Asking the right interview questions is crucial to screening.  The right questions tap into some critical attitudes and skills that your candidate will need in the role.

If the job involves working with children and young people - their most important role is to keep children safe.

 To keep children and young people safe in your service, you need to screen out inappropriate applicants AND hire people that will help you build a child safe culture.  You can achieve both these goals with interview questions that carefully tap into the values, attitudes, motives and behaviours needed to protecting children.  

Here are our five favourite interview questions:

 1.     Values Based Question

What does a “child safe culture” mean to you?

2.     Attitude Based Question

Tell me how you feel about supervision of your work and relationships.

 3.     Motivation Based Question

Tell me why you are interested in working with children and young people in this program.

4.     Behaviour Based Question

Tell me about a time that you have spoken up about the concerning behaviour of a friend or colleague and what happened.

 5.     Red Flag Question

Finally, you should carefully screen their application for any red flags and ask about these in the interview.  For example – I notice you only worked at this place for 2 months, can you tell me more about why you had such a short time in this role?

Want More?

If you want some more examples of great interview questions, you can get our PDF list of 16 interview questions.