The hiring manager may ask functional questions to test your payroll knowledge and expertise. These are sometimes referred to as hard skills or technical skills, often based in attention to detail, strong communication abilities and a knack for solving problems — and, better yet, preventing them. Some functional payroll questions you might hear include the following:
What is your experience with processing paychecks?
Try not to take this question too literally by recounting actual steps in the wage-payment process. Think more expansively. For example, talk about how you dealt with accuracy and timeliness, as these are the ultimate goals of paycheck processing. Also, mention any problems you successfully resolved for employees or their manager.
Which payroll laws are you familiar with?
The government can assess penalties on employers that fail to comply with payroll laws. So, the more you know about federal and state compliance requirements, the more points you’re likely to score with the hiring manager. At the very least, you should be familiar with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), state wage and hour laws, and payroll tax regulations. Depending on the position, more detailed knowledge of payroll laws may be required.
What is your experience working with a related department like human resources or finance?
This payroll question aims to reveal your collaborative abilities when it comes to working with other areas of the company that typically interact with payroll. For example, you can mention your work with human resources generalists when processing payroll for new hires or with the accounting team when verifying payroll information on financial statements.
What payroll technologies have you worked with?
Describe the payroll systems, software, and applications you’re versed in. If you’ve used the same technology brand as the prospective employer, that’s even better. And if you haven’t, you can simply mention other systems you’ve used while emphasizing that you’re a quick learner.
Can you name some payroll improvement ideas?
Provide solutions that can help strengthen a payroll department, such as:
Creating tighter payroll internal controls to reduce errors or fraud
Upgrading to an integrated HR/payroll system to streamline workflows
Developing a paperless payroll environment to decrease clutter
Devising new strategies to make payroll compliance easier to achieve
These questions are similar to behavioral queries but include a hypothetical component. These are real-life situations that you may or may not have experienced. Here are some examples of situational payroll questions:
An employee is angry because payroll made a deduction error on their paycheck. What are your next steps?
The intent is to uncover your conflict resolution abilities, so it’s important to come up with steps likely to result in positive outcomes. Explain, for example, how you first made sure you remained calm while listening to the angry employee, then apologized for the paycheck error, promising that the issue would be promptly corrected. Finally, relate the steps you took to accomplish the correction and your efforts to prevent the error from happening again.
During a payroll audit, you discover an error a coworker made. What are your next steps?
A satisfactory response would be to comply with the payroll department’s policy for reporting errors found during a payroll audit.
How would you respond to disasters or emergencies impacting the payroll department?
This is not the time to suggest seat-of-the-pants attempts you’d make to respond on your own. Say that you would follow the organization’s payroll continuity plan in the event of a disaster or emergency — such as a pandemic, data breach, fire, or flood.
