As an employer, a fair amount of your time probably goes to conducting job interviews when hiring staff. While it’s crucial to ask questions about your candidates’ goals, personality, and skills, there are certain questions that are illegal to ask candidates during an interview.
Part of your job is to know with U.S. hiring laws and and maintain compliance with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Not knowing which questions are illegal to ask during an interview could cause you to violate your candidates’ rights and put you at risk of lawsuits.
Below is a list of questions you legally cannot ask during an interview. If you need to know the answers to some or all of these questions, don’t worry. They’ll be answered organically after the candidate has been hired. But during the interview phase, you are not allowed to ask them.
Illegal Interview Questions:
- What is your national origin?
- Are you pregnant?
- How old are you?
- Do you have children?
- Have you ever been arrested?
- Are you married?
- Do you have any handicaps?
Legal Interview Questions
If you’re stumped on what you can ask your candidates, we have your back. Below is our list of suggested interview questions that will help you focus on the most crucial aspects of your candidates’ lives: their professional background, skills, passions, and more. Focusing on these aspects instead of your candidates personal lives and choices is a much more accurate way to determine the best candidate for the job.
- Tell me about yourself.
- Tell me about a time when you had to overcome a major obstacle at work. What were the circumstances? What did you do? What was the result?
- How do you stay up to date with industry trends and regulations?
- When I contact your previous managers, what will they tell me about you?
- Tell me about a time you worked with others to achieve a result.
- What is the toughest feedback you received? How did you react? What changes did you make as a result?
- What was your most recent failure at work? What did you learn?
- Why did you choose this career?
