Interviewing a financial advisor

LisaDiwa

Help! I am looking for a list of questions that a financial company can ask a financial advisor during an interview. I know there are general questions that apply to everyone, but I need to know if there are any specific questions for financial advisors. Thanks much.

Don D

LisaDiwa: Although I don't have any canned questions to suggest, I'll tell you that what you raise here is a common 'problem' for all of us in personnel. We can't know all things about all jobs and the company can't expect us to always identify the most excellent candidates from among the pool. Especially in specialty occupations or those requiring technical skills and specific expertise like the one you mention. Beyond what I call the "H.R. related inquiries", I usually defer to another manager who is more familiar with the field for the in-depth, field-specific questions. My opinion is that no matter how nice my list of key questions looks, if I am not intimately familiar with the content of the job, then I am likely not going to know what to do with the answer. I can ask a great question somebody may have passed to me; however, I sometimes won't have a clue how to gauge the response. If I'm talking to a candidate for the nuclear physicist position and someone has told me to ask him about the bilateral configuration of the nexus realities in normal continuums, and the candidate tells me "Frankly, it's been my experience that the norms prescribed for the nexus partical maximums is essentially incomplete and I always instead transfigure the ionic links with the colateral ingressive latex modums," which one of us is likely to know who is B...S....ing whom? Likewise, with your need for questions to pose to the financial wizard, have someone from the field get into those specifics. You and I aren't prepared to analize the response to the question. Stick to what you know. Never ask a question, the answer to which you are not prepared to handle. That's what I try to do. When, for example, I bring in engineering candidates or controllers, you can bet I will tell them right up front what my line of inquiry/discussion will be, and that they will also be talking today with Joe in Finance or Mary in process engineering for more job specific detail. I figure if I don't know how to judge the response to a question for the company, then I was ill-prepared to ask it. Otherwise, you're going to get over into some ice of unknown thickness.

AnneHa

A few years ago I was faced with trying to hire an Information Technology Coordinator. To say my technical knowledge is limited is to put it mildly. I could not write an adequate job description, much less come up with the type of questions that would give us the info we needed to make a good hiring decision. So, I called our local university and spoke with their university information systems director regarding the problem. What a guy! He basically provided a job description, composed the technical questions we needed...and then sat in on about a dozen interviews. He refused to let us pay him anything for his help. (We are a public library and his family used our services quite a lot.) I did send a letter to the university president and his direct boss letting them know what he had done and how much we appreciated it. The person we hired from those interviews is still with us and her department has expanded to six staff members. If you don't have any internal resources try your community resources.

AnneLa

There are times when we're all faced with the situation of interviewing a candidate for a position that is out of our realm. I tell the candidate quite honestly that although I'm trained in X and Y and have a degree in A, I don't know more than the basics about Z. I ask them to bring their description about their previous experiences down to my level, and take it from there. It makes the interview much easier and puts me at ease. If the person can't take it down a notch - they're not the person for us anyway!