Hir­ing the right per­son for a given job can be a bit of a craps shoot for many busi­ness own­ers — and for some HR man­agers as well. It seems obvi­ous that the most impor­tant things you want to answer are whether they can do the job and whether they fit into your team. But those are not paramount.

Guess­ing again? Integrity, intel­li­gence, suit­abil­ity to your “fast-paced envi­ron­ment”, exper­tise, ambi­tion, work ethic… all are plau­si­ble guesses about what the most impor­tant fac­tor might be in a poten­tial hire. And cer­tainly, most of these are impor­tant fac­tors, but none of them are crit­i­cal for the inter­view. I’m assum­ing, of course, that you aren’t going to make peo­ple fill out some inane apti­tude test or issue some irrel­e­vant quiz about what kind of tree they’d most like to be.

Think about it: the resume should tell you whether or not they can han­dle the job, and give you an indi­ca­tion about their per­son­al­ity and how well they’ve applied them­self in the past. To these points, the inter­view may have only a few clar­i­fy­ing ques­tions. The real ques­tion I think you want to answer is one that hits most appli­cants from left field, and seems to be most effec­tive when it isn’t asked directly.

Your task as the inter­viewer is to find out what each appli­cant is most likely to do when left to their own devices. For a lower-level job, you need to know the per­son can stay on-task and show some ini­tia­tive to get onto the next appro­pri­ate task when the first assigned one is com­pleted. For higher-level jobs, the ques­tion is more crit­i­cal, because key peo­ple can help shape and direct the com­pany — or mis­di­rect it and take you off-course as you quash some inter­nal struggle.

In a prior busi­ness, we devised a few dif­fer­ent ques­tions to help fer­ret out the answer, from dis­cussing inter­ests and trade pub­li­ca­tions or career goals to what we called “the dream job ques­tion.” In the dream job ques­tion, we would as infor­mally as pos­si­ble have the appli­cant describe their dream job or posi­tion. Any answer that resem­bled the job post­ing too closely was con­sid­ered void… the exer­cise nec­es­sar­ily had to push beyond the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion and into the career in which they saw them­selves, per­haps a few years down the road. If the direc­tion they wanted their career to go was a close enough fit for the com­pany, then they were in con­tention for the job. If it was too far off, the per­son wouldn’t be a good hire… even­tu­ally they’d want to pull in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion, or would end up look­ing for another job that was a bet­ter fit for them.

Peo­ple in any job that allows them some free­dom and flex­i­bil­ity will inevitably trend toward doing what they want to do, regard­less of what their actual duties are. Fig­ure out what they actu­ally want to do, and you’ll know if they’re a good fit. And some­times this requires fig­ur­ing out the answer before they even know what the answer is.