Job Candidates: Ask the Right Questions to Make the Right Impression

In every interview I’ve ever attended on either side of the table, there always comes a point where the interviewer asks if the candidate has any questions. It’s never been the case where a candidate who asked no questions was offered the job. You MUST ask the interviewers thoughtful questions or you won’t get the job! There are reasons for this.

Not asking questions…

Is a subtle rejection of the interviewers.

People have an innate desire to feel important and want you to express enthusiastic interest in them. People love talking about themselves to others who are genuinely curious. Interviewers feel a certain sense of power over candidates and desire for this to be recognized. To refuse to ask questions is to reject the interviewers. You’re saying, “I’ve heard enough from you, now give me the job.” You may not actually be as curious as interviewers would prefer, but you must appear curious, lest you disappoint your hosts.

Makes you look unprepared.

Sometimes crafty interviewers will try to throw you off or weed you out by asking specifically what you did to prepare for the interview. It’s essential you don’t have a stunned look on your face but instead have a convincing response. Whenever I’m a job candidate, I always prepare at least ten numbered questions in advance and print them out on several pieces of paper which I keep in a portfolio. I wait until the interviewer asks if I have any questions and then I reach into my portfolio and pull out my printed pages and hand them to the interviewers. I say something formal or impressive-sounding like “I’ve prepared several questions I’d like us to review…”. How many other candidates actually printed out a list of questions? Probably none, and this will immediately shine a favorable light on you. If you’re not already doing this for all your interviews, start now.

Makes you look undiscriminating.

Not having questions makes you look like you haven’t really thought critically about the job and are willing to take everything the interviewers tell you at face value. It makes you look like you don’t really care which job you get. It doesn’t give the impression you will suddenly become a critical thinker once you’re working in the job. No matter what job you’re in, there will be instances when it’s up to you to display good judgement, which requires critical thinking. You need to show your critical thinking in the interview with several thought-provoking, incisive questions.

Prematurely ends the interview.

The longer you’re in the presence of the interviewers the more time you have to build new relationships with them and sell your candidacy. The longer the interview lasts, the more memorable it is for the interviewers and the more invested they are in you by virtue of the time they’ve spent. The company may have decided to interview you despite some objections they had. Maybe they felt your education or experience was insufficient or that you lacked certain critical industry knowledge. The longer you spend with the interviewers, the more chance you have to mitigate their initial misgivings and turn their feelings to your favor. If you do a good enough job networking with the interviewers, they may suggest you for other positions inside or outside the company even if they don’t hire you for the current one.

Kills your chances of exposing red flags the interviewers may have concealed, knowingly or not.

Everybody knows that during the interview, you’re interviewing them as much as they’re interviewing you. If you don’t have any good questions, you’re effectively leaving out half of the equation. How do you know you’re not about to be the fifth person in this position in eighteen months? Maybe the boss is a jerk or your soon-to-be coworkers are unfriendly and cliquish. Maybe the job requirements are unrealistic and untenable. Maybe the company refuses to purchase necessary tools or resources for the job.

During an interview, I once asked the CFO of a small private company what their annual revenue was. He refused tell me. He wouldn’t even give me a ball park figure! HUGE RED FLAG. (It makes me wonder what else they were hiding.) I should have used this new information to immediately weed out this company. The fact that I did not shows my poor judgement in this situation, which ended under less than desirable circumstances. Live and learn, I guess.

What actually constitutes a true red flag is up to you, but if you don’t ask questions you won’t uncover them until it’s too late. I myself have ignored red flags much to my detriment. You must follow up with the company about every single red flag and make sure they agree to mitigate them in writing or you shouldn’t take the job. Ignore them at your peril. Don’t be so eager to leave your current job if it could turn out you’re jumping from the frying pan to the fire. The in-person interview is your chance to perform a due diligence through your probing questions.

Questions

Now you may be thinking, “Okay smarty pants, so what questions should I ask?” Well, the company doesn’t want to hire a dummy and you want to probe as deeply as possible to find out what’s really going on. So, you should ask hard questions. Questions intended to reveal information the interviewers normally wouldn’t volunteer. Show you’ve done your homework and that this isn’t your first rodeo. Ask questions which elicit insights other candidates won’t get.

Since this post is intended for general audiences and does not pertain to a specific job posting, I can’t provide job-specific questions. However, below are several sample questions and concepts to consider adding to your printed list.

Company Research

The best way to begin your questions is with one related to research about the company you’ve done online. Find recent articles or interesting information about company activities which might pertain to the job and ask follow up questions.

I once interviewed at a company which had recently undergone a huge sale-leaseback transaction. I asked what initiatives were now possible due to the new cash influx from the transaction. Another question probed if the company’s motivation was because of the need for cash for a specific initiative or just because it made good business sense. I was curious whether the position I was applying for was made possible in part by the new cash. Start by doing your research and then asking relevant questions.

“How long have you been advertising for this position and how many people have you interviewed so far?”

The answer to this question might give you clues about how desperate are to fill the position, how choosy they’ve been, or if other applicants have bailed for some reason. If you encounter apprehension, simply say that your motivation is to better assess your chances of getting hired.

If the position has been open for an unusually long time, say, longer than four months, you’ll want to know if it’s because other candidates have been put off by something unsavory or if the hiring managers are somehow capricious and not really in a hurry to fill the position. Try talking to current and past employees about the working conditions there. Truly good positions at good companies are usually swiped up quickly; you’ll want to know why this one hasn’t been yet.

“Is this a new role or is it available because someone left or was promoted?”

If the answer is that it’s a new role, then ask: “If the company is x years old, why is this position only starting now?” This isn’t just informational. Some executive decided a particular initiative was important enough to leverage their professional goodwill and requisition budget dollars for this headcount. When someone is spending money on a new position, you as the candidate want to know exactly what they’re intending to get for that money and whether you are willing and able to deliver it.

Special note: Usually a company is hiring someone because there’s a pressing need for the person. However, in some cases, executives at larger companies and governmental entities are in a “use it or lose it” position with their annual budgets. It’s possible they may be hiring a new person mainly in order to spend the budget dollars they’ve been allocated. In cases like this there’s much less urgency to fill the position until they’ve found the perfect fit. Try to elicit as precise and specific an answer as possible to why the company is hiring this specific role. If the interviewers can’t easily impart on you their sense of urgency, this may be why.

If the role exists because someone left or was promoted, ask, “How much documentation is available from the previous person to help facilitate my transition?” In other words, you want to know if you’re going to have to weave through years’ worth of someone else’s files, data, and processes to understand your new job. If possible, get them to show you the work area and work product of the previous person so you can see if they left you a mess to clean up.

“What would be the consequences to the business if the position wasn’t filled for, say, three to six more months?”

This will help you understand the degree to which the job is a critical operational component of the business or whether it’s just a “nice to have”. If the position is critical to the continuing operation of the business, ask how the company has been managing during the period without this position. If you’re supplementing a team which is currently overworked and “in the weeds”, it would be helpful for you to meet with these folks to make sure this is an environment you’d like to join.

“What does success in this role look like from the point of view of…”

My immediate supervisor?
The department?
The management?
The customers?

“Does your company have a documented path of career advancement for individual contributors?”

Many companies’ only path of advancement is through management positions where you oversee other people. The right individual contributors can be extremely valuable to a business even if they don’t oversee anyone. If you’re in an individual contributor role, make sure there’s a path of advancement if that’s your desired trajectory.

Departmental Autonomy

Often a department head will have the authority to hire employees but not have the authority to actually supply the employees with the tools or resource access necessary to do the job. In cases like this, the new person may request resource access the first day and twiddle their thumbs for a few weeks until another department supplies the needed resources.

Other departments may object to the hire and either refuse to cooperate or do so slowly. If you’re in a job where you’re used to using certain tools or having access to certain data, ask whether that will be immediately available. Ask if there have been conflicts about this role with other departments so you know what to expect when you start and you can plan accordingly.

Onboarding

In many companies, with a disturbing regularity, when new employees start, the company is not prepared to receive them. There’s no place to sit, the laptop isn’t ready, the email account hasn’t been set up yet, etc. Whenever this is the case, you can be sure the company does not regard employees as its greatest asset. In the absence of extreme mitigating circumstances, this should be regarded as unacceptable.

If I knew you were coming over to my house for a brief visit, I would: clean up the house, prepare something for you to eat and drink while taking into account your food preferences, ensure the temperature wasn’t too warm or cold, and make sure I didn’t have any pressing appointments which would abbreviate our time together. If I were going to hire you to work for me, I would do so much more! So, ask a few questions about the onboarding process to make sure they have their act together.

Technical Roles

In interviews for technical positions, it’s sometimes the case that none of the interviewers actually understand or appreciate the technical nature of the job. Like, at all. During an interview for a data analytics job, someone on the panel suggested I would hire a handful off-shore software developers to create cutting-edge software in-house to compete with professional companies with hundreds of employees. Nothing remotely related to software development or project management appeared on the job description.

So, in interviews for technical jobs, ask the interviewers, “Please explain what you understand to be the main responsibilities of this job.” Don’t be surprised if their responses differ from what’s written in the job description. Sometimes an interview panel member, often in a different department from the one you’d be in, will reveal more than they’re supposed to through their off the cuff remarks. Someone might say, “You’re going to be the new Larry!” By asking about “Larry”, you might find out more than you did in the job description.

Where does the buck stop?

Does the head of the organizational hierarchy operate from this office? Or is this office a branch or subsidiary which takes direction from leadership in another location? Does the top person in this company report only to the board of directors or is this company owned by a larger company which has a say in corporate strategy?

Subsidiary companies or branches usually don’t operate autonomously but are subject to the dictates of the owner company. That owner company is rarely on-site and is usually more concerned with the profitability of the subsidiary than with the welfare of employees at the local owned location where you’re applying for a job. Also, your branch office must often follow onerous business processes and protocols imposed by the owner company.

The owner companies occasionally make HR decisions which affect employees in ways that local leadership don’t agree with. Since the owners aren’t on site, they’re not subject to accountability by the employees and usually aren’t concerned with how local employees are affected. The local leadership are rendered powerless and ineffective and pass the buck to the owners who remain incognito. Make sure you know where the buck stops in the company where you’re applying.

Locked and Loaded

You can re-use some interview questions in multiple interviews; others are situation-specific. Make sure you show up locked and loaded for your next interview with pre-prepared questions. The right questions will make you look savvy and yield the information necessary to make the right decision.

Although this article covers interview questions, you may be wondering about salary negotiation once you’re offered the job. I’ve considered writing a post on the topic but there’s no way I could possibly top Haseeb Qureshi’s Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer. I consider his post the definitive guide on salary negotiation.