Getty
You’re almost there. You are on your journey to secure new employment, and you’ve been checking off all the requisite boxes. You have been networking and finding job opportunities that fit with your purpose, skills and needs. You have drafted great cover letters, tailored your resume for specific jobs, reached out to recruiters and submitted job applications. Now you’re getting calls from recruiters and hiring managers, bolstering your job interview techniques and preparing to answer and ask various interview questions.
But by now, the pressure might be getting to you because the job-hunting process can be challenging. The path from wanting to get a new job to actually securing one can become quite laborious and can cause great frustration along the way. To be sure, there are challenges on both sides of the equation—challenges for job applicants and hiring managers alike. So once you reach the point of actually locking down the job interview, you don’t want to waste the interviewer’s time and—surely—you don’t want to waste your own.
I’ve spent the last two weeks interviewing job candidates for various positions, and I’m tired now, but I’m also impressed. I’m impressed by the candidates who showed up prepared for the interviews and those who asked thoughtful questions. It makes it easier to believe that people take the whole process seriously and that they have a real interest in the organization and the job when they ask good questions. After 20 years of experience interviewing and hiring professionals, here’s my take on the five best questions you can ask during your next job interview and why you should ask them.
1. If selected for this position, what are some challenges or problem areas you’d hope or expect that I could jump in and immediately contribute to or collaborate on?
More than anything, you should want to learn more about the organization, gain a deeper understanding of particular pain points and pressing issues and appreciate how and where you can make immediate contributions. Hopefully you’ve done your homework prior to your interview to learn as much as you could about the role, the organization and the culture. Still, by getting a response to this question, you’ll gain more data that will either validate or enhance your understanding and give you a leg up with information that will help you demonstrate how you are the best fit for the role.
2. Can you describe what types of projects you foresee me working on in the first six months and with whom?
This question is fairly straightforward, but it does help you visualize how they view the position in terms of profile, reach, access or importance. You can gauge whether or not there may be a conflict for how you view the role and how your potential supervisor or team members view the role and its expected impact on organizational effectiveness. This is huge because you’ll want to be clear-eyed about the position and realistic about how they visualize it as opposed to how you visualize it. If you find that the gap here is too wide for you, this is where you’ll want to start contemplating if this position is actually the right fit for you.
3. When you think of your best employees (current or past), what have been some of their best traits, qualities or competencies? What has helped them deliver at high levels?
This is such an insightful question, and the response you get will tell you what the supervisor or hiring managers are looking for in terms of human behavior. Listen closely to the answer here, and you might learn precisely what kind of team member they are really looking for. Their response will help you understand what personality styles they like to work with, what type of soft skills they care about and what competencies you should highlight in your thank-you letter as well.
4. If selected for the position, what are two or three things I could do to lighten your load or more immediately help you achieve organizational goals?
Supervisors love getting this interview question from job candidates so if you are interviewing with the person who will indeed be your direct supervisor, ask this question. What this shows your prospective supervisor is that you understand that you will work for somebody and that you will indeed be expected to lighten his or her load. This question also shows that you think of yourself as a team member who needs to get in the mix and help the team—and the team lead—succeed as well.
And remember, it’s not just about asking great questions during the interview. The most successful—and effective—employees continue with value-add questions after they are hired. If your interview is successful, and you end up accepting an offer for the job, you’ll want to quickly begin pondering how to best create and demonstrate organizational value as a new hire. The answers you get to this specific interview question will likely give you information that you can use as work through this value-add process.
5. What do you love most about working here, and what did you find most surprising about the culture when you first started?
This question helps because the answer can give you some really good insight into the organization, its culture and regular operational aspects that outsiders don’t normally get. First, the interviewer(s) may receive this question as a pleasant surprise, and it serves to open the dialogue in more personal ways. I have used this question in past interviews and have always found it to be a great dialogue starter. The usual response is that the interviewers become more personable and often get an unexpected thrill out of being able to share these kinds of details with candidates.
Asking this question also gives interviewers a chance to share their story and reflect on aspects of the organization that get them in a happy place. This creates an opportunity for you to extend the conversation with the very people that you could end up working with. Finally, this question creates an opportunity for more meaningful connection.
This is what happens when you ask great questions during the job interview.
By asking great questions during the job interview, you will accomplish a couple of things. First, you will help interviewers gain some insight into how you think. Many times, we learn more about people by focusing on how they think rather than what they say. A great way to gain insight into how people think is to pay attention to the kinds of questions they ask. Second, you want to make sure that you use the interview as a time to demonstrate your desire to better understand the organization, learn about its pain points and challenges and leave interviewers with confidence that you’ll fit in and make immediate contributions to the team.
Now, what questions are you prepared to ask during your next job interview? You don’t need to ask all five of these questions, but you should ask at least three if you can. Whatever questions you ask, whether they come from this list or somewhere else, the key point here is that you ponder why you should ask your chosen question(s) at all, and evaluate how they might influence what the interviewer perceives about your thinking abilities after you ask them. See, while it is important that you pay attention to the answers interviewers give in response to your interview questions, you never want to forget that the interviewer will also be making assessments about you and how you think based on the substance of each question you ask.
Recommended reading options:
