Discord staff application questions to ask (with examples)

The best Discord staff application questions cover three things: availability (when can they help), experience (what have they done before) and judgment (how do they handle real situations). Pick 6 to 10 from the lists below, lean on scenario questions, and keep the answers private. Every question here can be copied straight into your form.

How to choose your questions

• Start with what you need. A night-shift moderator and an event host need different forms.
• Prefer scenarios. "What would you do if…" shows judgment; "Why should we pick you?" mostly shows writing style.
• Keep it short. Long forms filter for patience, not ability.
• Use select menus for facts. Time zone, region and platform are faster to answer and easier to compare as choices.

Basics and availability

1. What is your time zone?
2. Which days and times are you usually online?
3. How many hours a week can you give to this role?
4. How long have you been a member of this server?
5. Do you meet our minimum age for staff? (Yes / No)
6. Do you have two-factor authentication enabled on your Discord account?
7. Which devices do you use Discord on?
8. Are you staff in any other servers? If so, which?

Experience

9. Have you moderated or helped run a community before? What did you do?
10. Which moderation tools or bots have you used?
11. Describe a difficult situation you handled in a community. What happened?
12. What's something you'd change about how this server is run?
13. What do you think makes a good moderator?
14. Have you ever been warned, muted or banned here? Tell us about it.

Moderator scenarios

15. Two members are arguing and it's getting personal. What do you do first?
16. A member is spamming slurs in general chat. Walk us through your steps.
17. A long-time member breaks a minor rule for the first time. How do you respond?
18. A member DMs you a screenshot accusing another staff member of abuse. What do you do?
19. You disagree with a punishment another moderator gave. How do you handle it?
20. A friend of yours breaks a rule. What do you do?
21. Someone posts a suspicious link and several members say they clicked it. What now?
22. A member says they're being harassed in DMs by someone from the server. How do you help?
23. A raid starts while you're the only staff member online. What are your first three actions?
24. A member is clearly upset and venting in public chat. How do you respond?
25. Someone keeps almost breaking the rules without quite doing it. What do you do?

Support and helper roles

26. A member asks a question that's answered in the FAQ. How do you reply?
27. You don't know the answer to a support question. What do you do?
28. A member is rude to you in a support ticket. How do you respond?
29. How would you explain a complicated feature to someone new?
30. Which part of this server or product do you know best?
31. How do you decide when to escalate a ticket to senior staff?

Event and community staff

32. Describe an event you'd run in this server.
33. How would you get quiet members involved?
34. An event you planned has only three people show up. What do you do?
35. How would you announce an event so people actually read it?
36. What time slots would your events suit, and for which regions?

Developers and technical roles

37. Which languages and frameworks do you work with?
38. Link a project you've built or contributed to.
39. How do you handle secrets such as bot tokens?
40. A bot command is failing for some members but not others. How do you debug it?
41. How do you test a change before it reaches the live server?

Character and judgment

42. Why do you want this role?
43. What would you do if you made a mistake as staff?
44. Which of our rules is broken most often, and why do you think that is?
45. How do you handle criticism from other staff?
46. What should a member do if they think staff treated them unfairly?
47. What would make you step down from the role?
48. Is there a rule you disagree with? How would you enforce it anyway?
49. How do you keep staff discussions private?
50. What do you expect from the rest of the staff team?
51. Is there anything else we should know?

Red flags in the answers

• One-word or copied answers.
• Power motives: wanting a role color, a badge or the ability to ban.
• Punishing first in every scenario, with no attempt to talk.
• Not knowing the rules they'd be enforcing.
• Blaming others in every past conflict.

Set these questions up in Better Tickets

Better Tickets asks application questions one at a time in the applicant's DMs, as free text or a select menu, then posts the answers to a private review channel with Accept and Deny buttons. Applicants see a review screen before they submit. Add your questions on the Questions tab of an application category; application form settings covers each option, and how to safely set up staff applications covers eligibility rules, cooldowns and reviewer roles.