Hiring Strategy: Structured Interviews • Interview Scoring • Candidate Comparison
Some hiring concerns are easy to state and difficult to interview for.
A hiring manager might say:
This candidate looks great on paper, but I need to know whether they have an ego problem.
That is an understandable concern.
A person who cannot accept feedback, acknowledge mistakes, share credit, or recognize the limits of their own expertise can create serious problems for a team.
But “ego” is not a particularly useful interview score.
Neither is asking:
Would you describe yourself as humble?
Most candidates know the desirable answer.
A better approach is to translate the concern into behaviors you can actually explore.
How does the candidate respond when someone challenges their idea?
Can they describe a meaningful mistake without spending the entire answer explaining why it was really someone else’s fault?
Do they recognize other people’s contributions when discussing success?
Can they identify something they genuinely need to improve?
Have they ever changed their mind because someone else had better information?
Those questions give you evidence.
Don’t interview for whether someone appears humble. Interview for what they do when their judgment is challenged.
Humility Does Not Mean Lack of Confidence
One of the first mistakes hiring teams can make is treating confidence and humility as opposites.
A capable person can be very confident about what they know while still recognizing what they do not know.
They can advocate strongly for an idea and change their mind when better evidence emerges.
They can take pride in an accomplishment while accurately describing who else contributed.
Research on expressed humility in organizations has described it in terms of behaviors such as recognizing one’s strengths and limitations, appreciating the strengths of other people, and remaining open to learning and feedback.
That gives an interviewer a much more useful target than simply asking:
Does this person seem humble?
The goal is not modesty.
The goal is accurate self-perception and productive behavior when the person’s judgment, status, or assumptions are challenged.
Do Not Score “Ego”
If you are building a structured interview guide, avoid creating a competency literally called Ego.
It invites interpretation.
One interviewer may associate ego with confidence.
Another may mean arrogance.
Another may be reacting primarily to communication style.
Another may simply dislike the candidate.
A more useful competency might be:
Self-Awareness and Receptiveness to Feedback
Or, depending on the role:
Learning and Self-Correction
Then define the behaviors you actually want to evaluate.
Strong evidence might include someone who:
- Recognizes both strengths and limitations accurately
- Accepts useful feedback without excessive defensiveness
- Can describe mistakes and their own contribution to them
- Changes course when better evidence becomes available
- Gives appropriate credit to colleagues
- Seeks expertise from others when needed
- Can identify specific ways their behavior has changed over time
Now the interviewers have something concrete to evaluate.
That follows the same basic principle behind structured interviewing: decide what matters for the job before the candidate enters the room, ask comparable questions, and evaluate the answers against a common standard.
Why “Are You Good at Taking Feedback?” Does Not Tell You Much
Imagine asking:
How do you respond to constructive criticism?
A candidate can easily say:
I value feedback. I see it as an opportunity to learn and improve.
That sounds good.
It also provides very little evidence.
Job candidates understandably want to present themselves favorably. Questions that reveal their purpose too clearly make it especially easy to provide the socially desirable answer.
The solution is not to assume candidates are being dishonest.
The solution is to ask for a specific situation.
Instead of asking how someone generally feels about feedback, ask them to reconstruct an actual experience in which the feedback was difficult to hear.
Then probe.
- What was said?
- Who said it?
- What did you initially think?
- What did you do next?
- Did anything change afterward?
Now the candidate has to move from a desirable statement to behavioral evidence.
1. Ask About Feedback That Was Difficult to Hear
Try:
Tell me about a time you received feedback you did not initially agree with. What was the feedback, and what did you do with it?
This is stronger than asking about constructive feedback generally because disagreement creates tension.
Listen for whether the candidate can describe that tension honestly.
Useful follow-up questions
- What specifically did you disagree with?
- What was your initial reaction?
- Did you tell the person you disagreed?
- What happened next?
- Did you eventually agree with any part of the feedback?
- Did you change anything as a result?
- Looking back, how accurate was the feedback?
What stronger evidence can sound like
A strong answer does not require the candidate to say the other person was completely right.
They may still believe some of the feedback was mistaken.
What matters is whether they considered it seriously, separated useful information from disagreement, and adjusted where appropriate.
A candidate might say:
My director told me I was moving projects too quickly and leaving the team behind. I thought she was underestimating how urgent the work was. But when I asked two members of my team, they gave me almost the same feedback. I still believed we needed to move quickly, but I changed how I communicated decisions and started bringing the team into planning earlier.
That demonstrates more than agreement.
It demonstrates self-correction.
2. Ask About a Meaningful Mistake
Try:
Tell me about a decision or mistake at work that you wish you had handled differently.
This overlaps with assessing integrity and accountability, but here you are listening specifically for self-awareness.
Follow-up questions
- What did you misunderstand at the time?
- When did you realize you were wrong?
- What was your part in the outcome?
- How did other people respond?
- What did you change afterward?
- Have you encountered a similar situation since?
A candidate who says:
I’m probably harder on myself than anyone else, so nothing major comes to mind.
has not necessarily demonstrated poor self-awareness.
But they also have not given you useful evidence.
Keep probing.
People who have held meaningful responsibility have usually made decisions they would handle differently with hindsight.
The useful evidence is whether the candidate can examine one without turning the answer into a disguised success story.
3. Ask About Changing Their Mind
Try:
Tell me about a time someone with less experience, authority, or seniority than you changed your mind about an important decision.
This can be especially useful when interviewing managers and senior leaders.
The point is not whether the candidate frequently changes their mind.
Good judgment sometimes means holding your position.
You are looking for evidence that status does not determine whose information counts.
Follow-up questions
- What was your original position?
- Why were you confident in it?
- What did the other person see that you did not?
- At what point did you reconsider?
- How did you communicate the change to everyone else?
A strong candidate may be able to describe an instance when a technician, analyst, junior employee, customer, or other colleague knew something they did not.
That is a practical form of humility.
4. Ask How They Talk About Success
Try:
Tell me about an accomplishment you are particularly proud of. What made it successful?
At first glance, this does not sound like a humility question.
That is part of what makes it useful.
Listen carefully to how the candidate distributes responsibility.
Is everything:
I created…
I solved…
I delivered…
when the accomplishment clearly depended on a team?
Or can the candidate distinguish accurately between their own contribution and what other people did?
Follow-up questions
- What was your specific contribution?
- Who else had an important role?
- Was there anyone whose contribution was easy to overlook?
- Who deserves credit for the result besides you?
- What would have happened without those people?
You are not rewarding candidates simply for saying “we.”
Some people use “we” so extensively that you cannot determine what they personally did.
The stronger answer accurately assigns both personal responsibility and shared credit.
5. Ask About an Area Where They Are Not Strong
Try:
What is an area of your work where you have learned that you should seek help or involve someone with different expertise?
This is more useful than the classic:
What is your greatest weakness?
That question is familiar enough that many candidates arrive with a polished answer.
Instead, ask for a limitation that has influenced how they actually work.
Follow-up questions
- How did you discover that?
- What happens if you try to handle it alone?
- Who do you typically involve?
- Can you give me a recent example?
- Has that changed the way you build or use a team?
Self-awareness is not simply identifying a weakness.
It is understanding the consequences of that limitation well enough to manage around it.
6. Ask About Someone Else Having the Better Idea
Try:
Tell me about a project where another person’s idea was better than yours.
Follow-up questions
- What had you originally proposed?
- Why did you prefer your approach?
- What made the other idea better?
- How did you respond?
- Who ultimately received credit?
- What did you learn from it?
This question can put several useful behaviors into the same example.
Can the candidate recognize superior thinking?
Can they relinquish ownership of an idea?
Can they support a solution they did not originate?
Can they give someone else credit without diminishing their own role?
For managers and senior leaders, those behaviors can matter a great deal.
7. Ask About Overconfidence
Try:
Tell me about a time you were confident you understood a situation and later discovered that an important assumption was wrong.
This question can be particularly useful for jobs involving judgment and decision-making.
Follow-up questions
- What made you confident initially?
- What information were you missing?
- How did you discover the problem?
- What did you do once you realized the assumption was wrong?
- Did the experience change how you make similar decisions now?
You are not looking for someone who never acts confidently.
You are looking for whether confidence can survive contact with contradictory evidence without becoming defensiveness.
8. Ask How Their Leadership Has Changed
For experienced managers, try:
What is something you believed about managing people five years ago that you no longer believe today?
Follow-up questions
- What changed your thinking?
- Was there a particular employee or situation involved?
- What do you do differently now?
- What would the earlier version of you have done?
This question can reveal whether someone’s leadership philosophy has actually evolved.
A candidate with substantial leadership experience should usually be able to identify ways experience changed their thinking.
If every past belief remains correct and every difficult experience simply confirmed what they already knew, that may be worth exploring further.
Listen for Specificity, Not Humble-Sounding Language
A candidate can sound humble without demonstrating much self-awareness.
They can say:
I’m always learning.
My team deserves all the credit.
Feedback is a gift.
Those statements may be sincere.
But they are still statements.
Structured interviewing works better when you keep moving toward observable evidence.
Useful follow-up probes include:
- What exactly happened?
- What did you personally say?
- What did the other person say?
- Why was that difficult?
- What changed afterward?
- How would that person describe the situation?
- What would you do differently today?
The more specific the example becomes, the less useful generic interview language becomes.
What Strong Evidence Looks Like
Across these questions, several patterns are worth noticing.
They describe mistakes specifically
They can explain what happened and acknowledge their part without requiring several minutes of justification before accepting any responsibility.
They separate intent from impact
They may have meant well while recognizing that their behavior affected other people differently than expected.
They identify actual changes in behavior
“I learned a lot” is weaker evidence than explaining what they now do differently.
They give credit accurately
They neither claim everything personally nor disappear entirely behind “the team.”
They recognize limits without performing insecurity
A capable person can say:
That’s not my strongest area, so I bring in someone who knows it better.
They update their view when evidence changes
Changing one’s mind is not automatically a weakness.
Sometimes it is evidence that judgment is working.
What Deserves Further Investigation
No single answer proves someone has an “ego problem.”
Look for patterns across several questions.
An answer may deserve additional probing when the candidate repeatedly:
- Describes mistakes primarily as other people’s failures
- Cannot identify meaningful feedback that changed anything
- Presents weaknesses that are actually disguised strengths
- Claims disproportionate personal credit for team accomplishments
- Describes disagreement mainly in terms of other people’s inability to understand them
- Cannot remember an occasion when someone else had the better idea
- Treats changing their mind as losing
- Explains every poor outcome as unavoidable
- Repeatedly tells stories in which they were the only competent person in the room
Even then, the appropriate response is usually probe further, not diagnose the candidate.
You are collecting evidence about job-related behavior.
You are not trying to determine whether someone has a psychological disorder or assign a clinical label.
This is the same distinction discussed in What Personality Assessments Can—and Can’t—Tell You About a Job Candidate.
Be Careful With Style Differences
This is particularly important when evaluating humility.
Some people communicate confidently.
Others hedge.
Some candidates are comfortable talking about their accomplishments.
Others find self-promotion uncomfortable.
Some are naturally polished interviewers.
Others may be nervous even when they are highly capable.
None of those differences necessarily tells you whether the person accepts feedback, shares credit, recognizes limitations, or learns from mistakes.
That is another reason behavioral questions are useful.
Instead of scoring whether someone appears humble, score what they describe doing when the relevant situation occurs.
How to Score Self-Awareness and Receptiveness to Feedback
Suppose your structured interview competency is:
Self-Awareness and Receptiveness to Feedback
On a five-point scale, behavioral anchors might look like this:
| Score | Example evidence |
|---|---|
| 1 — Falls short | Avoids meaningful examples, consistently externalizes responsibility, dismisses feedback, or shows little recognition of personal limitations. |
| 3 — Meets expectations | Provides credible examples of receiving feedback or recognizing limitations and describes a reasonable adjustment in response. |
| 5 — Clearly strong | Provides specific, substantive examples showing accurate self-assessment, openness to challenge, meaningful behavioral change, and appropriate recognition of other people’s contributions. |
Scores 2 and 4 can represent evidence falling between those anchors.
The exact scale is less important than agreeing on what the numbers mean before interviewing candidates.
As discussed in How to Score Structured Interviews Consistently, written anchors give interviewers a shared standard against which to evaluate evidence.
Do not wait until someone you like is sitting across the table to decide what humility means.
Score the Evidence Before the Panel Discusses the Candidate
This competency can be particularly vulnerable to group influence.
Imagine the senior executive finishes the interview and immediately says:
I loved him. Very confident. Exactly the kind of leader we need.
An interviewer who noticed signs of defensiveness now has to express that concern after a powerful first opinion has already entered the room.
That is why each interviewer should record their evaluation independently before the group debrief.
If one interviewer gives self-awareness a 5 and another gives it a 2, do not simply average the disagreement away.
Ask:
What did each of you hear?
Perhaps one interviewer was impressed by the candidate’s willingness to describe a failure.
The other noticed that every failure in the candidate’s stories was ultimately blamed on someone else.
That disagreement is useful.
It tells the panel where to look more closely.
What Can a Personality Assessment Tell You?
Personality information can sometimes suggest useful areas to explore.
For example, a very assertive behavioral pattern might give an interviewer a reason to ask more about how the candidate handles challenge or disagreement.
A strong preference for independence might prompt questions about seeking input from other people.
But those patterns do not tell you whether someone is humble, arrogant, coachable, or self-aware.
Someone with a highly direct communication style can be remarkably open to correction.
Someone who appears quiet and accommodating can still resist feedback.
That is why personality information should generate questions rather than conclusions.
A personality assessment can tell you what to explore. It cannot tell you what a person has actually done.
The interview still needs evidence.
A Practical Structured Interview Set
If self-awareness, openness to feedback, and humility matter for the position, a structured interview might include several of these questions:
- Tell me about feedback you received that you initially disagreed with. What did you do with it?
- Describe a mistake or decision you would handle differently today.
- Tell me about a time someone with less authority or experience changed your mind.
- Describe an accomplishment you are particularly proud of. Who else contributed to the result?
- What is an area where you have learned to seek help or involve someone with different expertise?
- Tell me about a project where someone else’s idea was better than yours.
- Describe a time you were confident about a situation and later discovered one of your assumptions was wrong.
- What is something you used to believe about managing people that experience has caused you to reconsider?
You probably would not use all eight questions in a single interview.
Select the questions most relevant to the job.
Ask the same core questions of every candidate competing for that position.
Then use consistent follow-up probes to get beyond generalities.
The Question Behind the Questions
The hiring manager who asks:
How do I make sure this person doesn’t have a huge ego?
is usually asking something more practical.
They want to know:
- Will this person listen?
- Will they learn?
- Will they take responsibility?
- Will talented people be able to disagree with them?
- Will they recognize expertise they do not personally possess?
- Will success become “my success” while failures become “their failure”?
Those are legitimate hiring concerns.
But you will get better answers by turning them into observable behavior than by trying to read personality from an interview.
Humility is easy to claim.
Self-awareness is easy to describe.
The evidence is in what the candidate has actually done when their confidence, judgment, status, or self-image was challenged.
That is what the structured interview should help you uncover.
For more on building evidence into the hiring process, see Structured Interviews, How to Score Structured Interviews Consistently, How to Assess Integrity and Honesty in a Structured Interview, and How to Compare Job Candidates.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can you tell if a candidate has a big ego in an interview?
Avoid trying to judge ego from demeanor alone. Ask behavioral questions about receiving difficult feedback, admitting mistakes, changing one’s mind, sharing credit, and recognizing personal limitations. Look for patterns across specific examples rather than relying on a general impression.
What is a good interview question for assessing humility?
One useful question is: “Tell me about a time someone with less experience or authority than you changed your mind about an important decision.” Follow up by asking what changed the candidate’s thinking and how they responded.
How do you assess self-awareness in an interview?
Ask candidates to describe specific feedback, mistakes, limitations, or situations where their original judgment turned out to be wrong. Stronger evidence usually includes clear personal responsibility, specific lessons, and identifiable changes in behavior.
Is humility the same thing as low confidence?
No. Someone can be highly confident while still recognizing personal limitations, appreciating other people’s expertise, accepting useful feedback, and changing their position when evidence warrants it.
Should “ego” be a structured interview competency?
Usually it is better to translate the concern into observable job-related behaviors. A competency such as “Self-Awareness and Receptiveness to Feedback” gives interviewers a clearer and more consistent basis for evaluation.
What are warning signs when discussing mistakes?
Repeatedly blaming other people, avoiding meaningful examples, minimizing personal responsibility, or describing every poor outcome as unavoidable may justify further probing. No single response should automatically determine the hiring decision.
Can a personality assessment identify an arrogant or humble candidate?
General workplace personality assessments can provide context about behavioral tendencies and preferences, but they should not be used to determine whether someone is humble, arrogant, coachable, or self-aware. Those questions require behavioral evidence.
Should all candidates receive the same questions about self-awareness?
For a structured interview, candidates competing for the same job should generally receive the same predetermined core questions and be evaluated against the same standards. Consistent follow-up questions can be used to clarify their answers.
Should interviewers score self-awareness before discussing the candidate?
Yes. Each interviewer should record their independent evaluation before the panel discusses the candidate. This helps preserve independent judgment and makes meaningful disagreements easier to identify and investigate during the debrief.
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