Why Employee Surveys Are the Secret to Better Interview Questions

If you want to know what predicts success at your company, there's a more direct route than most hiring managers take.

The most common approaches — generic competency frameworks, off-the-shelf behavioral question banks, or intuition built up through experience — all share the same fundamental problem. They describe what predicts success in general, not what predicts success at your company. The difference matters more than most people realize.

What works at a fast-growing consumer startup can actively fail at a regulated financial services firm. "Comfort with ambiguity" is a virtue in one environment and a liability in another. "Process adherence" is boring to some companies and mission-critical to others.

The cleanest way to identify what actually predicts success at your company is to look at the people who are already succeeding — and the people who aren't — and find out what's different about how they think and work.

Employee surveys are how you do that at scale, without bias, and in a way that can be directly translated into better interview questions.

Why Your Current Team Is the Best Data Source

Your existing employees are a living record of your hiring decisions. The ones who are thriving represent successful hires. The ones who are struggling represent gaps in your process. The patterns between these groups contain more signal than any external framework.

But extracting that signal isn't as simple as asking your best people "what makes you good at this job?" That question produces post-hoc rationalization, not genuine insight. People are terrible at accurately analyzing the source of their own performance. They'll tell you what they believe about themselves, which is often not what's actually driving outcomes.

The more productive approach is behavioral and attitudinal questioning — asking employees how they actually behave in specific situations rather than what they believe about themselves. When you compare those answers across groups, patterns emerge that you couldn't have predicted going in.

How the Survey Process Works

The core methodology is comparative: you survey employees who are performing at different levels, and you look for the attitudinal and behavioral differences between groups. Not individual differences — group patterns.

Step 1: Identify your comparison groups.

You need two groups: high performers and everyone else (or alternatively, high performers and clearly lower performers). The harder part is defining what "high performer" means in your context.

This requires going beyond tenure or title. A 5-year employee with a VP title might be lower-performing than a 2-year individual contributor by the metrics that actually matter for the role. Use real performance signals: output quality, peer feedback, project ownership, the informal "who would you grab if you had a hard problem to solve?" test.

Be honest. The validity of everything downstream depends on honest group assignment.

Step 2: Write questions that surface attitudes through behavior.

Attitude surveys that ask "how much do you agree with: I take ownership of my work" produce useless data. Everyone agrees. The question doesn't discriminate between high and low performers because everyone believes they take ownership.

Useful survey questions are situational and behavioral. They ask what people do in specific circumstances:

• "When you get stuck on something at work, what's your typical first step?"
• "How do you usually handle it when you disagree with a decision your manager made?"
• "When a project is behind schedule due to something outside your control, what do you typically do?"
• "Describe your approach when you're working on something where the requirements aren't fully clear."

The difference in responses between your high and low performer groups reveals genuine attitudinal differences — because the answers are harder to fabricate and harder to dress up for social desirability.

Step 3: Gather responses anonymously.

Anonymity is not optional. It changes what people say.

When employees know their specific answers will be read by their manager, they optimize for how they want to be perceived. When they know responses are grouped and analyzed without individual attribution, they're more candid — especially about working styles, frustrations, and behaviors they might not want to advertise.

Practically: this means giving each employee a unique survey link (so you can track whether they responded) but not associating their answers with their identity in any reporting. You see responses aggregated by group: "High Performer Group" and "Low Performer Group" — not by individual.

Step 4: Compare the groups for attitudinal patterns.

The analysis looks for questions where the response patterns differ meaningfully between high and low performers. Those differences are your attitudinal predictors.

For example, you might find that high performers consistently describe seeking out ambiguous problems and making decisions with incomplete information, while low performers consistently describe needing clearer direction before starting. That's a real attitudinal difference — and it tells you what to hire for.

Or you might find that high performers are more likely to describe directly confronting teammates about issues rather than escalating to managers first. That's a behavioral pattern tied to communication style and ownership — and it should shape both your hiring criteria and your interview questions.

Step 5: Translate findings into interview questions.

Once you have 4–6 attitudinal predictors, you build behavioral interview questions to surface each one in candidates. The questions are now grounded in real data from your actual team, not generic "communication skills" or "problem solving ability."

If "seeks out ambiguity" is a predictor, your question becomes: "Tell me about a time you were given a goal without a clear path to achieve it. What did you do in the first week?" And you know what a strong answer looks like — because you've heard how your high performers describe similar situations.

This is exactly the process that CultureMatch automates. You tag employees as high or low performers, send each group anonymous survey links, and the platform analyzes the response patterns to identify the attitudinal differences. The output is a set of precisely articulated attitudes, plus behavioral interview questions and scoring rubrics built specifically to surface them in candidates.

Why Anonymous Surveys Outperform Other Methods

The alternatives to structured employee surveys are more common but less reliable.

"Ask your best people what makes them good": As noted above, this produces self-reporting bias. People optimize for how they want to be seen. It also misses the comparative element — you need to know what high performers have that others don't, not just what high performers say about themselves.

Consultant-derived competency frameworks: These are built from research across many companies and roles, which means they're valid on average. But your company isn't average. The frameworks that consultant firms sell are calibrated to broad industry patterns, not to the specific culture and context of a 50-person B2B SaaS company hiring its first VP of Sales.

Manager intuition: Experienced hiring managers do accumulate genuine pattern recognition over time. But intuition is vulnerable to confirmation bias, demographic similarity, and the particular failures that happened to stick in memory. It also doesn't transfer — an experienced hiring manager's pattern recognition doesn't help other interviewers on the panel.

Personality assessments: Tools like DISC, Myers-Briggs, or Hogan have real validity research behind them for some applications. But they measure trait dimensions (extraversion, conscientiousness, etc.) that are correlated with job performance in aggregate — not with success in your specific role at your specific company. They also don't generate behavioral interview questions.

Employee surveys done well — with real comparison groups, behavioral questions, and genuine anonymity — give you something none of these alternatives can: a data-grounded definition of what success at your company actually looks like, expressed in behavioral terms that can be directly assessed in candidates.

What Good Outcomes Look Like

When this process works, you end up with a few specific outputs:

A named set of 4–6 attitudinal predictors. Not generic values, but specific behaviors and mindsets that distinguish your high performers. Something like: "Questions assumptions before starting; comfortable changing course mid-project; handles critical feedback without defensiveness; volunteers for undefined problems rather than waiting to be assigned."

Custom behavioral interview questions. One or two questions designed to surface each predictor, calibrated to what you've learned from your team. These aren't questions pulled from a generic bank — they're built to surface the specific things you know matter at your company.

A scoring rubric. For each question, a description of what a strong, adequate, and weak answer looks like — based on how your own high performers talk about similar situations.

A candidate scorecard. A structured tool for interviewers to rate candidates independently before the debrief, reducing the influence of the first person to speak in the room.

The whole package is what a good HR consultant might build for you in 4–6 weeks at a cost of $5,000–$20,000. The employee survey approach — especially when structured and automated — gets you equivalent output in hours, at a fraction of the cost.

Getting Started

The minimal version of this process:

1. Identify 5–10 people who represent clear high and low performers in the target role (3–5 per group is workable, more is better)
2. Write 8–10 behavioral questions about how they approach work — asking about what they do, not who they are
3. Send the survey with explicit anonymity guarantees; group responses, never individual
4. Compare the two groups' responses and look for consistent patterns in the differences
5. Name 4–6 attitudes based on the patterns you find
6. Build a behavioral interview question for each, and define what a good answer looks like

That's the process. It's not complicated. It requires honest assessment of your team and good survey design — which is where most DIY efforts break down.

If you want the process automated — survey generation, anonymous collection, AI-powered comparative analysis, and custom interview guide output — that's exactly what CultureMatch is built to do.

For more on translating survey findings into effective interviews, see our guides on hiring for attitude and behavioral interview questions.

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Want to find out what your high performers actually have in common? CultureMatch handles the anonymous survey design, data collection, and AI analysis — and delivers a custom interview guide built on your team's real data.

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