I made this at Oyster during our rapid hiring phase. The problem I was trying to solve was to bring consistency to the hiring process. First, I wanted to make sure that all the candidates had an equitable experience. Second, I wanted my team to not spend a lot of mental energy trying to figure out what questions to ask at different stages.

The thought was to align these questions to make sure you’re assessing the right competencies as you go along. Some of them are specific to different stages, but they’re all tagged according to what we’re trying to measure for.

I’ve collected these questions over the years from a handful of different places. Some are questions I like in 1:1s. Some are questions I’ve used in team surveys. Some are questions I’ve been asked in interviews, or that I’ve been told to ask when hiring at previous companies. There’s no one main source of truth, and I can’t take credit for the majority of them.

There is a method to the madness of when to ask these based on the way that you've organized your interview process. I placed the questions into the stages where I have found them to be most valuable, but that's not to say that they need to be exclusive to these stages.

The introduction is the recruiter phone screen. A lot of those are going to be the starter questions. Role fit is typically done by the person's manager and talking more about the specifics of the role, and it gets into nitty gritty details. Team fit tends to be a bit more about culture and is conducted by people they’d be working closely with. Those questions are about collaboration.

I got asked this question in one of my first interviews, and I had no idea that there was a “right” and “wrong” answer when I was answering it. The way that it was taught to me is that someone's likely to either answer based on: 1) I'm proud of this thing because it achieved a certain outcome or 2) I'm proud of this thing because I loved the process of creating it.  It’s revealing of how someone finds pride in their work and what they're oriented toward.

Those are two very different mindsets. Depending on the role you're hiring for, you might optimize for one over the other. For example, we might want more of the outcome/numbers person for demand gen or growth marketing roles. For creative and content roles, we might want someone who finds pride in the creation process.

I love this question because I want to see if someone will engage with us. Can they think expansively about the future? In a lot of the company cultures I’ve been part of, optimism and hope are important. I want to see if a candidate can find the positive. It helps assess if they’d fit on the team and if they’d be able to offer a unique perspective.

It also gives them a chance to speak both about the job itself, but also their life outside of work.

The ideal and pause answers are intended to remove as much bias as possible from the interview process, especially unconscious bias. Determining in advance what's an ideal answer and what's a pause answer makes the interviewer less susceptible to variance in the way they score a response


My goal was to be as objective as possible in the ideal and pause answers. At other companies I’ve scored each answer so you have a rubric. You’re looking at a number rather than subjectively trying to judge a candidate. We were moving too fast at Oyster and sometimes speed can create a poorer, less equitable candidate experience

This question is one of my favorites to ask at the beginning. It helps determine if they’re able to articulate what they do without using jargon.

When hiring roles at more senior levels, we would sometimes choose a different set of questions. Some questions might be too obvious to a senior candidate, or not as revealing about what we are looking for. To distinguish between junior-level and senior-level candidates, we would sometimes change the ideal answer to look for more depth, look for more specificity, look for more outcomes at a business level versus a team level.

One way we got feedback on the questions was seeing which ones candidates really dug into and gave expansive answers on versus which ones they struggled to answer. The hiring managers would also give feedback if a question wasn’t as helpful as we were hoping, or if it was hard to determine where an answer fit on the spectrum of ideal versus pause.

Kevan Lee

I made this bank of interview questions at Oyster during our rapid hiring phase. It's a collection of questions I've found over the years from a handful of different places. 

Marketing Interview Question Bank at Oyster

Marketing Interview Question Bank

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