Candidates are searching your interview questions while they are sitting in the interview. We know because those searches land on our website, and we can see them: the exact wording of standard competency questions, typed into Google with the question mark still attached, twenty one of them in a single month. The fix is not a harder question, because any question with a correct answer now has a two second answer. The fix is to stop asking candidates to describe capability and start asking them to demonstrate it, on site, next to the machine, in a walkthrough. It takes twenty minutes and it cannot be searched.
A client rang us last year, genuinely puzzled. He had interviewed a production supervisor who gave what he described as the best answer to a conflict resolution question he had ever heard. Structured, calm, three examples, a reflection at the end.
The guy lasted five weeks. He could not run a shift handover.
Nothing about that interview was a lie. It was just an interview about being interviewed.
We found the proof in our own search data
Every month we look at what people type into Google before they land on this website. Most of it is what you would expect. Factory jobs in Sydney. What is labour hire. How to write a resignation letter.
Then there is the other category.
In one month, twenty one searches that reached our site were unmistakably questions being pasted in live, word for word, punctuation intact. Together they were seen roughly two hundred and fifty times, and we sat at an average position of just under seven for them, which means we were on the first page of results for almost every one.
Here are four of them, exactly as they were typed.
What was searched | Times it was seen | Our average position |
“What are some steps you take to make major decisions at work?” | 45 | 6.0 |
“True or false: casual workers in Australia are entitled to annual leave just like full time employees. true false” | 95 | 4.0 |
“Warehouse managers should develop ________ communication skills.” | 24 | 5.9 |
“Draft a leadership message to inspire a culture of accountability and care in EHS” | 13 | 9.6 |
Read them again slowly.
The first is a competency question with the question mark still on it. Nobody types a question mark when they are researching a topic. They type a question mark when they have copied a question.
The second and third are assessment items. Somebody is doing a course and the multiple choice is in front of them. Fair enough.
The fourth is our favourite. That is not a search. That is an AI prompt. Somebody wrote an instruction for a chatbot, pasted it into the wrong box, and Google served them our leadership article. Which, in fairness, is roughly what they asked for.
Straight up
We are not telling you this to make you suspicious of candidates. We are telling you because it is measurable. This is not a survey or a trend piece. These are real searches from real people, and the same thing is happening while your hiring managers are asking their favourite question and nodding at the answer.
Why this is not a candidate integrity problem
The temptation is to get annoyed about it. Resist that, because the moment you frame this as cheating you will design a worse process.
Think about what we have actually asked people to do. We invented a genre of question that rewards a rehearsed narrative, we published the format everywhere, we told every job seeker to prepare using the STAR method, ourselves included, and then we acted surprised when they prepared.
A candidate looking up “steps you take to make major decisions at work” is not being dishonest. They are being conscientious. They want the job, they know there is a shape the answer is supposed to have, and they are trying to produce it.
The problem is not that they searched. The problem is that searching worked.
What actually happens
A hiring manager asks a candidate to describe a time they handled a difficult team member. The candidate delivers a clean, well structured answer with a beginning, a middle and a lesson learned. The manager writes “great communicator” on the sheet.
Six weeks later that same person cannot tell a forklift driver that his pallets are stacked wrong. Not because they lied. Because talking about a conversation and having a conversation are different skills, and only one of them was assessed.
The four questions that have stopped working
These are not bad questions. They were good questions. They are now searchable, which is a different thing.
1. “Tell me about a time you dealt with conflict at work.” Has a canonical answer available in every job seeker guide ever written.
2. “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” Everybody knows the trick. Everybody performs the trick. Everybody pretends nobody noticed.
3. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Tests whether a candidate has read the same article your hiring manager read.
4. “Why do you want to work here?” Now answerable in eleven seconds by any AI tool that can read your About page. Often more fluently than your own staff could manage.
If a question can be answered well by someone who has never done the job, it is not measuring whether they can do the job.
Straight up
You do not need to ban phones, install proctoring software, or come up with clever trick questions. Every one of those things makes you look paranoid and makes good candidates walk. You just need a question that has no correct answer, only a real one.
What a good question looks like now
The test is simple. Ask yourself whether a stranger with no experience of your site could answer it convincingly after thirty seconds of searching. If the answer is yes, replace it.
Compare these.
Searchable: “How do you prioritise competing deadlines?” Not searchable: “Two orders are due at 2pm, you have one forklift and one operator, and the client on the smaller order is the one who rings us. Walk me through your next ten minutes.”
Searchable: “How do you maintain quality standards?” Not searchable: “Here is a batch that failed inspection this morning. Have a look at it and tell me what you would check first.”
Searchable: “Describe your leadership style.” Not searchable: “You are on the floor at 6am. Two people have not turned up. Who do you ring first and what do you say to the shift?”
The second version of each is specific to your site, your equipment and your actual Tuesday. There is no article about it. There is no prompt for it. There is only whether they have done it before.
The walkthrough, and why we build our process around it
Everything above is why we do not run traditional screening interviews as our primary assessment. We run walkthroughs.
A walkthrough is exactly what it sounds like. The candidate comes to the site, or to a comparable site, and we walk them through the work. Not a tour. A walk through the job. What is that machine. What would you check before you started it. Where would you stand. What is wrong with this stack. Show me how you would set up for a changeover.
We are not looking for perfect answers. We are looking for the things that only exist in people who have actually done the work: where their eyes go first, whether they touch anything before they understand it, whether they ask about the thing an experienced person always asks about.
What actually happens
A candidate with fifteen years on paper walks onto the floor and stands in the wrong place. Not dangerously wrong, just wrong in the way that tells you they have not spent much time near a machine like this one. Meanwhile the quiet one with a patchy resume walks in, glances at the guard, glances at the emergency stop, and only then asks his first question.
Neither of those things came up on a phone screen. Both of them were obvious within ninety seconds on site.
That is the whole argument.
How to run a walkthrough at your own site
You do not need us for this. You need twenty minutes and somebody who knows the job.
- Pick the room, not the boardroom. Do the assessment where the work happens. If that is not practical, do it in front of a photograph or a machine that is offline.
- Have an operator present, not just a manager. The person who does the job every day will hear things the manager will not.
- Ask them to describe before they act. “Talk me through what you are looking at.” Experience shows up in what people notice, not in what they touch.
- Give them one realistic problem. Not a puzzle. A Tuesday. A short order, a late truck, a machine that is running but sounds wrong.
- Watch the safety instincts. Nobody rehearses those. They are either present or they are not.
- Ask what they would want to know before their first shift. Good operators always have a list. It is one of the most reliable signals there is.
Write down what you saw within ten minutes of them leaving, before the conversation blurs into an impression.
Straight up
The most common objection we hear is that this takes too long. A walkthrough takes about twenty minutes. A wrong hire in a production environment costs you weeks of supervision, a training investment, the recruitment cost again, and the morale of the shift that had to carry them. We have never once had a client tell us the twenty minutes was the expensive part.
What to do about AI in the room
Assume it is there. In a video interview, assume there is a second screen. In a written application, assume the cover letter was polished by something. This is not cynicism, it is just 2026.
Then decide it does not matter, because you have designed an assessment that AI cannot sit.
Practically, that means three things. Weight your decision toward what happened on site rather than what was said on a call. Treat written applications as a filter for effort and accuracy, not for personality. And if you use video interviews, use them to arrange the walkthrough, not to replace it.
The candidates who are genuinely good at the work are, in our experience, delighted by this. They have spent years being beaten to jobs by people who interview better than they work.
Frequently asked questions
Are candidates really searching questions during an interview?
Some of them are. We can see the searches landing on our site, question marks and all, and a portion of them are unmistakably live. Others are candidates preparing beforehand, and some are students doing coursework. The point is not the proportion. The point is that any question with a standard answer now has a standard answer available instantly.
Should we ban phones in interviews?
No. It makes you look distrustful before you have built any trust, and it does nothing about preparation done the night before. Change the question instead of policing the room.
Do behavioural interview questions still have any value?
Yes, as a conversation starter and as a way of hearing how somebody explains themselves. Just do not treat the answer as evidence of capability. Use them for rapport and use a practical assessment for the decision.
What if we cannot bring candidates on site?
Use photographs, a short video of the line, or a physical sample. We have run useful assessments with a failed part on a table. The principle is that the candidate has to react to something real rather than describe something remembered.
How do we test office and administration roles this way?
Same principle, different props, and it works just as well for the office and administration roles we place. Give them a genuine messy inbox scenario, a real spreadsheet with three errors in it, or a customer complaint email to draft on the spot. Twenty minutes of doing beats an hour of describing.
Does this slow the hiring process down?
Usually it speeds it up, because you stop running second and third interviews to resolve doubts that a single practical session would have settled.
The point
Our client with the excellent conflict resolution answer now runs a walkthrough for every supervisor role. His last three hires are all still there. One of them interviewed badly, in the traditional sense. He was awkward on the phone and his written application was thin.
On the floor, he found a guard that was not sitting right before anyone had asked him anything.
You cannot Google that.
If you would like a hand designing a practical assessment for your site, or you would rather hand the whole process to somebody who runs walkthroughs every week, talk to our team. We recruit across manufacturing, warehousing, logistics and office support, and we have not asked a candidate where they see themselves in five years for quite some time.
