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Our blog offers important resources, helpful articles, and practical ideas on the human resources topics that matter to you.
Home / Media / Blog / When Critical Thinking Skills are a Must to Hire For
In order to understand the importance of hiring a critical thinker for your business, let’s start by defining “critical thinking.” Critical thinking can be defined as the ability to objectively identify, analyze, and solve a problem and/or situation through thorough research and understanding.
Critical thinkers follow the “Who, What, When, Why, and How” approach when addressing problems and/or situations.
Most every position within a business requires a certain degree of critical thinking. For example, an accountant must be able to thoroughly analyze and interpret financial data of the business and successfully communicate the outcome of the analysis, while a marketing manager must be able to collect and evaluate information about the business’ target market and communicate the offerings to potential clients.
Critical thinkers ask all of the hard questions, they identify the strengths and weaknesses of the business, identify problems, and provide creative ideas and solutions to fix them. They think outside the box and look for important details. Many businesses find that hiring employees who have strong critical thinking skills is important and beneficial to their business; therefore, they are identified as assets to any business when aligned with the right roles.
Although many people are very good at thinking critically, not everyone has the ability to think in this manner. Experts state that critical thinking skills are developed over time and not all individuals are designed to be critical thinkers. Therefore, the challenge is to identify which specific critical thinking skills are required for a position.
There are several different categories of critical thinking skills. However, let’s focus on the top six types to look for in a potential candidate:
Start by putting together a complete list of interview questions prior to the interview.
Here are a few sample critical thinking / behavioral interview questions and how to drill for details if you don’t hear them right away:
Tell me about a time when you were the first to identify an error or problem in data, a process or a system you were working with.
Tell me about a time when you had to make a critical decision with little information.
Tell me about a time when you were the one presented with a problem that you had to solve in order to complete a project, launch an initiative, or to meet a deadline / objective.
As you can anticipate, the responses to the interview questions will be different for every applicant; however, the use of the same questions in search of specific behaviors allows you to evaluate and score their answers equitably.
That moves us to the second step: Analyzing the interview question responses.
It is important to look for responses that demonstrate strong critical thinking skills… analytical, interpretation, evaluation, problem solving, and communication. Did the interviewee successfully demonstrate strong critical thinking skills? Was their thought process methodical or haphazard? Did they maximize resources or work within a bubble? Did they present a solution or just ask for help?
There’s a benefit to tailoring interviewing to uncover critical thinking skills for those roles that need them to save time, money, and resources through more efficient, on-going problem solving. If you haven’t already assessed where you need these assets, it’s time to dust off the job descriptions, update them accordingly, and start purposefully hiring critical thinkers where they make the most sense.
Written by Julie Morgan, SHRM-CP and Valerie Juarez SPHR, SHRM-SCP
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