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Questions·5 min read

Twelve questions worth asking

Questions that get you real information, sorted by who is best placed to answer them.

A good question does two things at once: it tells you something you actually need to know, and it shows the interviewer how you think. A bad question does neither — "what's the culture like?" invites a paragraph of adjectives nobody will remember, including the person saying them.

Ask the right person. A recruiter cannot tell you how technical decisions get made, and a future peer cannot tell you the band for the role. Matching the question to the source is half of getting a real answer.

Ask the recruiter

  1. How many stages are there, and who is in each one?
  2. Is this a new role or a backfill? If backfill, what happened to the person before?
  3. What is the band or range you are working with for this level?
  4. What is the timeline you are hoping for, and are there other candidates at final stage?

Ask the hiring manager

  1. What does this role need to have delivered by month six for you to consider the hire a success?
  2. What is the hardest part of this job — the part that makes it hard to fill?
  3. How are decisions made when your team and another disagree? Walk me through a recent one.
  4. What does the team do well that an outsider would not guess from the outside?

Ask a future peer

  1. What surprised you in your first three months?
  2. What does a normal week look like — how much is planned work versus reacting?
  3. When something goes wrong here, what actually happens?
  4. Who has grown here, and what did that look like?

Questions to retire

  • "What's the culture like?" — you will get adjectives. Ask about a specific decision instead.
  • "What do you love about working here?" — a pleasant question that yields nothing you can act on.
  • Anything answered on the homepage. It reads as not having looked.
  • Anything that is really a demand in disguise — remote days, salary, holidays — before an offer conversation. These are fair questions; they belong with the recruiter, at the right stage.
You are not asking questions to look engaged. You are deciding whether to spend two years of your life here.
Twelve questions worth asking · CVPilot