What is the Best Question to Ask people When You Hire Them

"Starting with your earliest memory, what did you like doing and did well?" Then put that through primary school, secondary school, college, university and work assignment afterward, until you start to see a real pattern of where people's real talents and strengths are.

You'll also see patterns of dependency, independency or interdependency  and you'll see a pattern of working with things, people or simply ideas. You must also be willing to share strategically developed criteria of the roles you expect people to play.