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.