Education 2.0 & 3.0

Maybe your favorite interview question is one of the most common interview questions. Maybe it's one of the most common behavioral interview questions. Or maybe you have a less conventional interview question you like to ask, like those asked by these company founders and CEOs.

What is your favorite interview question? To find out, we asked the Inc. community on LinkedIn to provide their favorites, as well as their reasons why. Below are some of the responses; go here and here to see them all.

1. "What is the hardest thing you've ever done?"

The answer can be personal or professional. What the candidate accomplished isn't as important as how -- and why. What were the hurdles? What were the roadblocks? Did the candidate seek help? Does the candidate credit the people who helped?

The answer also can provide insight into how the candidate defines "hard," and how their perspective align with the challenges your business faces.

How inclusive or exclusive should organizations be when developing their employees’ talents? In a world of unlimited resources, organizations would surely invest in everyone. After all, as Henry Ford is credited as saying, “the only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.” In the real world, however, limited budgets force organizations to be much more selective, which explains the growing interest in high potential (HiPo) identification. An employee’s potential sets the upper limits of his or her development range — the more potential they have, the quicker and cheaper it is to develop them.

Scientific studies have long suggested that investing in the right people will maximize organizations’ returns. In line with Pareto’s principle, these studies show that across a wide range of tasks, industries, and organizations, a small proportion of the workforce tends to drive a large proportion of organizational results, such that: