It really depends on who is administering the first pass questionnaire and how they have been prepared. When I was doing hiring, a dedicated recruiting team was tasked with doing this first round, which we called "prescreen questions". I spent a lot of time briefing the people talking to candidates for my team on how to interpret the answers, and I encouraged them to keep detailed notes so we could audit what candidates were saying and needed to adjust something. I personally reviewed every prescreen result to make sure we didn't pass on someone who could provide more than the straight forward answer. However, we found that prescreens were most effective when the answers were straight forward and there was only one way to interpret the question (that is, for prescreens, non-essay answers are preferred).