5 Must-Ask Questions Before Hiring
Jul 08, 2025
Before you spend time, money, and resources interviewing and onboarding a new team member, ask these five simple but very powerful questions before hiring to help you identify if this person would truly be an asset in your organization.
If you ask these questions, you can determine whether that candidate will be a good fit for your company before they join the payroll. This is a very smart move, especially since making a bad hire and losing employees can negatively impact your finances, as turnover is one of the biggest hidden costs in our organization.
How costly is turnover? We have made a lot of calculations with many of our clients to uncover how much it costs to lose an employee. The averages have been anywhere between $500 and $1,500 per person.
That means if you verify someone is a good fit and will stay with you long-term, you can save $1,500 per person each year, which would boost your profitability because that money goes directly into your pocket!
Interesting, right? Let's find out what those five simple but powerful questions are, so that you can start asking them before the interviews and help reduce turnover.
By the way, you could include these initial questions on the application form, so you can have the opportunity to review the answers before you set up the interview.
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Q1: Why Did you Apply to Work for our Company?
The first question you should ask before hiring is, ‘Why did you apply for this job?’ This will let you know whether they're simply looking for any job at any company or if their intentions are more focused.
Ideally, they should have searched a little about your franchise organization, what you do, and how you do it. If that’s the case, that will be a green light because something within your business genuinely interests them and may inspire them to stay longer with you.
But if you discover that they don’t really care about the job or the company, that might be a red light. This lack of interest may result in a low loyalty towards your franchise business, and it may also be an indicator that they are only looking for their next paycheck.
Q2: What is Your Ideal Schedule?
The next question you should ask before hiring is, ‘What is your ideal schedule?’ Your franchise business has certain scheduling policies, peak times, and specific needs, and you must ensure that the candidates can fulfill all of these.
- But rather than you telling them what the schedule is, ask them first what their availability and ideal schedule are.
Their answers will let you know if they match what you need and what you're offering, or if they are flexible to discuss different options. If so, move on. However, if they have conflicts with the working hours, that could be a red flag.
You must also understand their expectations because they might just take your job while finding another one that better matches their available hours or the desired schedule.
Q3: What Positions Would you Be Interested in Learning?
The third question you may want to ask your potential team members is, ‘What positions are you interested in learning?’ Yes, I said “positions” because if they show interest in more than one position, cross-training them is possible, which brings flexibility to your team.
It also means that they're curious and may have a franchise career path in mind. If they get bored by doing just the one thing, they want to take an active part in the team, and they're willing to learning other things and be more productive, this person could even become a future leader of your organization.
On the other hand, if they answer that they just want to do whatever job they apply for, that will tell you that they're not flexible and not interested in growing or having a career within your franchise.
This may be fine for you. However, if you are a Franchisee in a growth mode, you will need as many people as possible, and you will want to cross-train them so they can scale within the organization. This lack of interest may be a red flag.
Asking this question before the interview will also reveal their long-term thoughts and potential for leadership in your organization.
Q4: What are your Career Aspirations?
The fourth simple but powerful question you want to ask any of your candidates before hiring is, ‘What are your career aspirations?’
Often, people look at jobs in the franchise industry as temporary jobs. This question will help you identify as quickly as possible if the person is interested in growing, so you can then share that, even if they're applying for a frontline team member, your organization offers growth opportunities.
Again, if you are a Multi-Unit Franchisee, you must make sure that one out of every two employees you hire, at least, could be a potential leader, regardless of the position they're going for. That way, you can grow and develop them into leaders for the future.
That is how you're going to be able to build your internal bench and, as you're growing and opening units, have the people with leadership potential and abilities ready to grow.
- Don’t make the mistake of hiring leaders only when you think you need them!
That will cause you to spend much time and money urgently searching for leaders for your new units. And that is not the right way to do it.
If you're not growing much and just need stable, steady, reliable, and consistent employees who will do the tasks they were hired for, that's a different discussion. But if you're growing, asking about their aspirations becomes a crucial question for anyone applying for a job in your organization.
In case you missed it: Winning Strategies for Staffing and Talent Acquisition
Q5: What is your income goal?
The fifth key question is, ‘What is your income goal?’ or ‘How much money are you expecting to make?’ or ‘How much money would you like to make?’ or however you wanna phrase that question.
This is going to be key before you share what the pay is. Think about it!
- If you share first, they will probably match what you're offering just to get the job, but it may not necessarily be what they're looking for.
- But if they need the job and it's less than what they wanted, they might say yes, but then the moment they get another job that pays them just a little more, they might just jump into it.
And that is why you need to ask that question before they know what the job pays. This way, if you pay more than what they're looking for, they will be happy. But if you pay less, you know that will disappoint the candidate, which is something you want to avoid as much as possible to ensure a very positive employee-employee relationship right off the bat.
The goal of asking these five key questions before hiring is to discover if the person should go to the next step of the process, the interview, based on their answers. That way, you won’t spend time, money, and resources on the interviewing phase if they are not the right fit.
I hope this was helpful and gave you some tips on what to ask to improve your hiring processes.
If you'd like to learn other ways you can have great people in your organization, or you want to train your leaders on how to do this the best possible way, explore our educational programs for Franchisees, District Managers, and Unit Managers, and discover what we teach, how we teach it, and the outcomes that will help you succeed.
Reflections:
- Do you know your turnover rate and how much it costs you?
- Do you have your recruiting & hiring processes and systems in place?
- What is your schedule compliance?
- How are you attracting and retaining top talent to your organization?
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