Critical thinking is one of those traits where an interview is genuinely at its worst. To assess whether someone thinks critically, you'd ideally watch them work through a problem in real time. You'd see them encounter conflicting evidence, watch them decide what to trust and what to question, observe them distinguish between a strong argument and a plausible-sounding weak one. An interview gives you none of that.
What an interview gives you is stories about past thinking, edited to present the thinker in the best possible light. The candidate has already resolved the uncertainty, made the decision, and lived with the outcome. They know how it ended. Their account of their own reasoning is retrospective, curated, and almost certainly more coherent than the actual thinking was at the time.
That said, if you're going to ask interview questions about critical thinking, there are better and worse ways to do it. Below are five questions worth using, followed by an honest account of why they still have limits, and what actually gives you a reliable read on this.
5 critical thinking interview questions
These questions are designed to get candidates talking about situations where they had to genuinely evaluate information rather than just act quickly or work hard. Push past the surface answer. The interesting material is usually in the reasoning, not the conclusion.
"Tell me about a time when you identified a flaw in an approach that everyone else in the organisation had accepted as standard."
This question gets at the willingness and ability to question received wisdom. Strong answers will include a clear description of what the flaw was, why it mattered, and how the candidate identified it when others hadn't. You're looking for a specific reasoning process, not just a vague sense that something felt wrong.
Watch out for answers where the "flaw" turned out to be minor or where the candidate's objection was more about personal preference than logic. The best answers will show that the candidate actually understood why the existing approach was flawed, not just that they were uncomfortable with it.
Probing questions
- How did you first become aware that something wasn't right with the existing approach?
- What was the reasoning behind the original approach, and where specifically did it break down?
- How did you make the case for changing it, and what happened?
"Describe a situation where you evaluated a proposal or plan and found a significant problem that others had missed."
Critical thinking in professional settings is often about evaluation: reading a proposal, assessing a business case, reviewing a plan. Strong answers here will be specific about what the problem was, why it was significant, and what made it easy to overlook. You want to understand the candidate's analytical process, not just the fact that they spotted something.
If they can't explain why others missed it, that's interesting. Either they got lucky, or they're not entirely sure what they actually noticed. Either way, worth exploring.
Probing questions
- Walk me through how you approached reviewing the proposal. What were you looking for?
- Why do you think others who'd also looked at it hadn't flagged the same issue?
- How did the people involved respond when you raised it?
"Tell me about a time when you changed your mind based on new evidence, even though you'd already committed to a position."
This is one of the most direct probes for genuine critical thinking, because updating on evidence is exactly what good critical thinkers do. It's also uncomfortable to admit in a professional setting. Strong candidates will be specific about what the new evidence was, why it changed their view, and how they handled the shift with whoever they'd originally convinced.
Be sceptical of answers that are too comfortable. "I changed my mind and everyone agreed I'd done the right thing" is suspiciously tidy. The situations where someone genuinely updated their view despite having committed publicly tend to involve some awkwardness.
Probing questions
- What was the original position, and how confident were you in it?
- What specifically made the new evidence convincing enough to change your view?
- How did you communicate the change of position, and how was it received?
"Describe a time when you had to make a recommendation after weighing up genuinely conflicting information."
Real critical thinking often involves working with information that doesn't all point in the same direction. Strong answers here will include a clear description of what the conflicting information was, how the candidate decided which sources or data to weight more heavily, and how they communicated the uncertainty in their recommendation. You're not just looking for the conclusion — you're looking for the reasoning about the reasoning.
Probing questions
- What were the different sources of information, and why did they conflict?
- How did you decide which evidence to give more weight to?
- Did your recommendation acknowledge the uncertainty, or did you present it as more definitive than you felt?
"Tell me about a time when you identified a weakness in an argument that was being used to justify a significant decision."
Arguments used to justify decisions often sound more solid than they are. This question is asking whether the candidate noticed, whether they said something, and what happened when they did. Strong answers will include a specific description of the argumentative flaw (not just a feeling that something was off) and a realistic account of how that played out in practice.
This can also reveal something about intellectual courage. Identifying a flaw privately is one thing; raising it when everyone else has bought in is another.
Probing questions
- What specifically was wrong with the argument? Can you describe the flaw?
- How did you raise it, and in what context?
- Did it change the decision, or did things proceed as planned regardless?
Why interviews aren't the best tool for this
The core problem is that critical thinking is a live cognitive process, and interviews assess it retrospectively. You're asking someone to describe how they thought about something in the past. Their answer will be a reconstruction, shaped by knowing how things turned out, by the time they've had to rationalise their choices, and by an entirely reasonable desire to come across well.
Good storytelling can easily be mistaken for good thinking. A candidate who is articulate, structured, and confident will sound like a rigorous thinker even if the actual reasoning in the moment was less impressive. Conversely, someone who thinks very carefully but finds it hard to narrate their process compellingly will often underperform in this kind of interview exchange.
There's also a preparation effect. Candidates who prepare for interviews will have specific examples ready. They'll have thought about how to present their reasoning in a way that sounds systematic and considered. The example they bring may be genuinely representative, or it may be a carefully selected outlier. You have no way to know.
Interviews are late in the process to be discovering someone isn't who you thought they were.
What actually works for measuring critical thinking
Critical thinking is one of the few traits where there's a genuinely direct measurement option: a critical thinking assessment. Unlike personality assessments (which measure tendencies and preferences), a critical thinking test gives candidates actual reasoning problems to work through — evaluating arguments, identifying flaws in logic, drawing valid conclusions from evidence. The score reflects how they actually think, not how they describe their thinking.
Schmidt, Oh and Schaffer's (2016) meta-analysis found that cognitive ability measures are among the strongest predictors of job performance available. This isn't a soft-skills assessment: it's an aptitude test, and it's designed to measure reasoning directly. The candidate either follows the logic correctly or they don't. There's no room for the kind of impression management that shapes interview answers.
We cover this in much more depth in our article on how to assess soft skills, but the core idea is that when you're trying to measure something cognitive, a cognitive test is almost always going to outperform an interview question.
Conclusion and next steps
The five questions above can surface useful material, especially if you probe carefully and push candidates to be specific about their reasoning rather than just their conclusions. But they're measuring something adjacent to critical thinking, not the thing itself.
If you want a more reliable read, our aptitude assessments are designed by business psychologists and validated against job performance data. They give you a direct measure of reasoning ability rather than a measure of how well someone can talk about reasoning.
Ben Schwencke
Chief psychologist at Test Partnership. MSc in Organisational Psychology with over ten years experience in psychometric testing.
