Stress Management

Why stress management questions are crucial

Stress is part of life. And most jobs have stressful elements. 

That’s why you need employees who can keep calm in a crisis. 

Employees with great stress management can:

• Reach objective decisions
• Keep everyone calm
• Come up with solutions when the going gets tough

Top tips: 

• Use behavioral and situational interview questions to find out how candidates handled stress in the past.
• Avoid generic questions and instead ask candidates to describe specific work examples of when they beat stress.
• Use realistic examples that make them think about real-life experiences.

Stress management interview questions

• How do you prepare for presentations to C-level staff and stakeholders?
• How would you respond if you got back feedback in front of colleagues? 
• What’s the most stressful situation you’ve ever faced at work? How did you cope?
• How do you stop a situation from becoming super stressful?
• How would you calm down a stressed-out colleague?
• Everyone gets too stressed sometimes. Can you describe a time when your stress resulted in an error at work?
• How do you cope with tons of changes at work? 
• How do you manage to keep up your quality work under tight deadlines?
• Can you stay objective in tough situations? (i.e. having to fire a team member.)
• How do you balance life stress at work?

Candidates to look for

• Solution-focused: Look for candidates who offer the best solutions and maintain composure in unexpected circumstances.
• Calm candidates: Look for candidates who stay calm even when you ask tough questions.
• Easy to relax: Job interviews are stressful, but don’t be fast to reject candidates who seem on edge at first—as long as they chill out quickly. 

Candidates to avoid

• They fixate on the cause: Avoid candidates who focus on the cause of the stress, instead of taking action.
• Stressful candidates: You don’t want an employee who stresses people out, like people with bad time-management skills or people who get wound-up easily.
• They look uncomfortable: Check in on their body language for some extra clues on their stress levels.
• They never get stressed: You need a balanced candidate. If they never get stressed they might just not care enough.