Use this curated bank to probe a candidate’s rigor, accuracy, and consistency. Categories include behavioral, situational, and live exercises, with notes on what “good” looks like.

Quality Mindset & Habits

• Tell me about a time you caught an error before it reached a customer.
  Good answers: Clear stakes, detection method, fix, and prevention mechanism added (checklist, alert, template).
• What personal system do you use to avoid careless mistakes?
  Good answers: Repeatable routines (double-check passes, read‑back, peer review), tooling, and examples of measured error reduction.
• When speed and accuracy conflict, how do you decide?
  Good answers: Risk-based tradeoffs, SLAs, impact assessment, explicit escalation when accuracy is critical.
• Describe your end-of-day audit.
  Good answers: Task review, inbox zero/triage, unresolved flags list, next-day prep, and documentation updates.
• What’s the smallest defect you’ve insisted on fixing and why?
  Good answers: Principle of craftsmanship, compounding effects, brand trust, or downstream cost.

Information Processing & Instructions

• Walk me through how you parse a vague request.
  Good answers: Clarifying questions, restatement for confirmation, written acceptance criteria, and version control of requirements.
• Share a time misinterpretation caused an error.
  Good answers: Ownership, root cause, correction, and a new safeguard (templates, SOP update).
• How do you verify you followed instructions exactly?
  Good answers: Checklist mapping, acceptance tests, screenshots/artifacts, sign‑off logs.
• What signals tell you requirements changed silently?
  Good answers: Divergent stakeholder comments, new constraints, mismatch with earlier specs; responds by pausing and realigning.
• How do you handle ambiguous numbers or units?
  Good answers: Unit checks, sample calculation, assumption doc, and explicit confirmation.

Data Accuracy & Numeracy

• You inherit a spreadsheet with inconsistent totals. What’s your triage?
  Good answers: Identify sources, reconcile to a single source of truth, audit formulas, add validations and calc tests.
• How do you prevent copy‑paste errors?
  Good answers: Named ranges, references not values, protections, and sanity checks (sum/avg deltas, row counts).
• Tell me your approach to sanity‑checking a dashboard metric.
  Good answers: Back-of-the-envelope, compare to historical bands, cohort slices, and definition checks.
• Walk through a recent estimate you corrected.
  Good answers: Initial assumption, evidence that disproved it, size of variance, and documented lesson.
• What’s your review checklist before sending numbers to executives?
  Good answers: Definition alignment, rounding rules, footnotes, version/date, and peer review.

Documentation & Version Control

• How do you keep procedures current?
  Good answers: Change log, owners, review cadence, and visible “last updated.”
• Describe your file naming/versioning conventions.
  Good answers: Semantic names, dates or semver, single source folder, and archiving policy.
• What artifacts do you leave for the next person?
  Good answers: README, assumptions, gotchas, and handoff checklist.
• How do you reduce context loss during handoffs?
  Good answers: Templates, decision logs, and required fields in tickets/docs.
• A time documentation prevented a repeat incident?
  Good answers: Specific incident, SOP change, and tracked recurrence drop.

Process Adherence & Continuous Improvement

• What process deviation is acceptable? When not?
  Good answers: Risk-based exception, documented variance, and retrospective to decide whether to update the process.
• How do you measure defect rates?
  Good answers: Clear denominator, severity levels, trend charts, and owner for each class of defect.
• Example of a kaizen you drove.
  Good answers: Baseline metric, change introduced, and before/after.
• How do you embed checks without slowing everyone down?
  Good answers: Automations, linters, templates, sampling strategy, and stage‑gates only where risk warrants.
• What audits do you run weekly?
  Good answers: SLA breaches, data integrity, open loops, and stale items.

Communication & Collaboration

• How do you write messages that minimize back‑and‑forth?
  Good answers: Context + ask + options + deadline; bolded action items and confirmations.
• What do you do when you spot a teammate’s mistake?
  Good answers: Assume positive intent, suggest fix with evidence, and update shared guardrails.
• How do you track commitments you’ve made to others?
  Good answers: Task system, reminders, explicit due dates, and closed‑loop confirmations.
• Preferred format for delivering complex info?
  Good answers: Short summary up top, numbered steps, visuals/tables, and appendices for detail.
• How do you safeguard details under pressure?
  Good answers: Timeboxing, checklists, buddy checks, and forcing functions before send.

Detail‑Oriented Case Prompts

• Proofread this paragraph and list the exact edits with reasons (grammar, tone, ambiguity).
• Reconcile two data extracts with mismatched row counts; produce a one‑page findings summary.
• Bug triage: review 5 tickets and prioritize; justify with severity/impact and steps to reproduce.
• Spec read‑through: highlight ambiguous requirements and propose acceptance criteria.
• Email QA: given a draft to a customer, run a pre‑send checklist and fix issues.

Role‑Specific Variants

• Engineering: Code review checklist items you never skip. Good answers: Tests, edge cases, error handling, performance, logging.
• Product/Design: How you prevent spec/design drift. Good answers: Source of truth, redlines, annotations, version locks.
• Ops/Finance: Reconciliation and approvals. Good answers: 2‑way/3‑way match, maker‑checker, thresholds.
• Customer Support: Case notes quality bar. Good answers: Repro steps, timestamps, customer quotes, resolution path.
• Marketing/Content: Fact‑checking workflow. Good answers: Sources cited, links validated, style guide checks.

Tip: Ask for artifacts (docs, sheets, tickets) and have candidates narrate their checks. Good detail‑orientation shows up in systems, not slogans.