In a job interview, there are few things worse than responding to an interviewer’s final question, “Do you have anything to ask me?” by saying “No, I’m all set.”
According to Sara Hutchison, CEO and executive career consultant at Get Your Best Resume, not coming prepared with questions will “kill the tone” — even if it was a great interview up to that point.
“The questions you asked show whether or not you did research,” Hutchison said. “It shows that you’re genuinely interested in this organization or in the technologies.”
Best Questions to Ask in an Interview
- Why is this position open now?
- What is the 90-day plan for this role?
- If you left this company, what would you miss the most?
- What is the biggest challenge facing this team right now?
- What does career growth in this role look like?
- How would you say the company supports its employees?
- How do you practice and implement your company’s values?
- What excites you about the company’s direction?
To help you leave a positive impression in your next interview, we asked HR leaders and career advisers to provide the best types of questions to ask during a job interview. It might just be the difference between securing an offer and not.
Questions About the Job Role
1. Why Is This Position Open Now?
While there’s a risk that this question could put the interviewer on the defensive if the last person in the role left on bad terms, asking this question can help you understand important information about the team. You could ask, “Is the role brand-new, and if so, what prompted its creation?” If you’re pursuing an established role, you might want to know how many people have held the position lately. If there’s been a revolving door of people in the role and high turnover on the team, that might be a red flag.
You could even ask, “Where did the previous person in the role go? Did they stay at the company and climb up?” said Dawid Wiacek, career and interview coach and founder of The Career Fixer.
2. What’s a Non-Obvious Skill That Would Make Someone a Great Fit for This Role?
This is a question that can help you stand out in a later-stage interview. You’re ultimately asking the interviewer what would be the skills that their dream candidate would have. Maybe you actually have this skill, and this presents an opportunity to talk about it. Or, if you don’t have that skill and are interested in learning, you could talk about ways you would be willing to acquire it.
3. What Tools and Platforms Do Your Teams Work With?
If you’re applying for a software development or data science role, you’ll likely be expected to work with a variety of technology stacks, and some might be unfamiliar. Ask about what platforms or tools you’ll need to use as a part of your role and find out what kind of training resources they offer to help you learn new technologies.
“Asking what value the customers will get from what we build shows that you’re not just myopically thinking about how to write a line of Python or build a machine learning model,” said David Fellows, chief digital officer at Acuity Knowledge Partners. “You’re actually thinking about providing solutions that people can use.”
Typically, don’t save this question until the end of the interview process, and don’t pose the question to the recruiter or someone not on the technical side.
4. What Is the 90-Day Plan for This Role?
To understand what roadmaps and support exist for a certain role, a helpful question to ask is, “What is the 90-day plan for this role?”
“It should be clear. They should really understand what the first 90 days should look like, and if it’s not, I think that tells you a lot about the level of organization,” said Emily Connery, senior director of people and talent at ChartHop.
Ultimately, you could ask the more common but important questions like, “How will the success of this candidate be measured?”
“It helps you to kind of have goals for yourself for those first three to six months,” Hutchison said. “It gives them an idea of what their expectations are and how much guidance you’re going to have before they let you on your own.”
Questions About the Company and Company Culture
5. If You Left This Company, What Would You Miss the Most?
This is a way to flip around the question that candidates often hear, “Why do you want to work at this company?” You want to understand the best parts of the company and why employees stay.
“This gets the person talking and loosens them up and engages them on a different level, rather than just talking about the sometimes dull job description,” Wiacek said. “It humanizes the interview experience.”
6. What Surprised You About Working at This Company?
This can elicit a positive or negative answer, but either way, it will give you important insight about the workplace culture and company dynamics.
“It’s a surprising question and can help you be more memorable as a candidate and can help you stand out against those who ask boring questions or don’t engage the interviewer,” Wiacek said.
7. What Is the Biggest Challenge Facing This Team Right Now?
Every company has areas for improvement, and this helps you start to understand what challenges you might encounter should you be offered the role.
Stacy Ulery, assistant director for career education and engagement at UCLA Career Center, said that asking this question allows you an opportunity to showcase your problem-solving skills or talk about another similar project you worked on.
“It’s another opportunity for you first to demonstrate that you’ve done your research, that you understand the industry, you understand the company’s place in the marketplace but also what can you bring to the table to help them,” she said.
If you’ve done advanced research or learned about a challenge in a previous interview, Lily Valentin, head of operations for North America at Adzuna, suggests presenting a potential solution to the company’s problem.
“It’s most important to hear questions from a job seeker that really embeds themselves in the business and the business framework,” she said.
8. How Does This Company Handle Failure?
The answer to this question will tell you a lot about a company’s resiliency and how it supports people when mistakes and shortcomings inevitably happen. It’ll be helpful to learn what systems and tools of support the company offers employees to ensure success. Do you get mentorship and coaching in these instances?
“Use this question wisely. It may not be appropriate for Type-A companies or interviewers. But if you have succeeded in previous roles and have every reason to believe you’ll give 100 percent effort in the new role, then it’s a fair question to ask of the employer,” Wiacek said. “For some of my clients, they only want to work for companies that invest in their people, and actually put their money where their mouth is.”
9. How Do You Think This Company Stacks Up Against Your Direct Competition?
This question will give you a sense of how the company perceives itself and how it is thinking about maintaining a competitive advantage against other players in the industry.
“A weak answer might give you pause. A good answer will give you confidence that the company is proactive, transparent, honest, prepared,” Wiacek said. “You need to grill the company as much as they want to grill you.”
10. Can You Tell Me About How Communication Happens Here?
Does the company host all-hands meetings? How often should you expect one-on-one meetings with your supervisor? Are there team meetings? You should get answers to these questions by asking about communication.
Another communication question you could ask is, “How does the company interact with the executive team?”
“That could be very telling in terms of how the executive team shows up. Are they like Oz behind the curtains, or are they really a part of the teams?” Connery said.
It is also helpful to learn how different teams communicate with each other, especially if you’re in a highly collaborative role. Wiacek said many of his clients in the tech industry cite challenges in communication between tech teams and nontechnical departments, so it’s a good idea to learn how the company works through communication challenges like that.
11. How Is Performance Rewarded?
Some companies might reward excellent performance with bonuses, while others focus more on awards or recognition. If a company doesn’t place a high value on feedback or acknowledge exceptional work at all, you could end up frustrated in your role.
“People might ask questions more about compensation or promotions but not necessarily, ‘How is performance rewarded?’ I think if people stumble in answering that question, it might not be an environment where people feel recognized,” Connery said.
Should you be offered the role and be looking at a promotion with the company down the road, it would be helpful to have information at the start of your tenure about how leveling is determined for roles and how promotion decisions are made, so feel free to ask about that during the interview process as well.
12. How Does Your Company Plan to Keep Innovating?
Your interviewer might be excited to answer a question about how the company is innovating. This question will help you understand how the company feels about new ideas, new technologies and adapting in the ever-changing tech world.
It’s also important to understand what the vision for the company is and how the company plans to innovate for the future. Kimberly Terrill, associate director for career education and development at UCLA, suggests asking questions about how the company’s mission and focus might change in the future. What are the hopes and aspirations for the company?
“Tech changes so quickly. Even five years is a long time in tech,” she said.
Questions About Employee Development and Job Growth
13. What Does Career Growth in This Role Look Like?
This question will help you determine if there are opportunities for you to grow at this company and help you envision how the role fits into your career path. Plus, it shows that you are excited about the potential of sticking with a company for years to come.
“When people ask those questions in interviews, it suggests that they want to stay at this company in the long term, that they’re not just looking at this as a waystation, and that’s really appealing to employers,” said Erin Brown, associate director of graduate student career services at UCLA.
14. How Does the Company Invest in Training and Development?
This question will give you a sense of whether or not the company cares about nurturing its talent and growing existing employees’ skills. Another related question is, “What is manager coaching and training like?” This question is good to ask, even if you’re not pursuing a managerial role.
“If people are like, ‘I don’t know what happens there,’ then that makes it clear the company doesn’t invest in management, which is so critical to everyone’s experience,” Connery said.
15. How Does Your Company Support Its Employees?
At any job, you’re going to run into challenges or snags that you’ll need help overcoming. Before joining a new company, you want to be positive that they care about their employees and will support you when things get tough.
When applying to jobs in the middle of the Covid pandemic, Ji Park, a software developer at LaunchPad Lab, knew that jumping into a new role while remote would be tricky. She wanted to make sure that whatever company she joined would provide her with adequate support to make the transition.
“In my interview I made sure to ask what resources the company provided to make people feel well-adjusted,” Park said. “I wanted to know that they were aware of the common challenges teammates might face and were ready to help them out.”
16. What’s the Typical Career Path for Employees in This Role?
This is a great question to explore what kind of movement is possible within a company. Perhaps employees who thrive in a role follow a specific career track within their department and receive promotions. Or maybe they’ve moved laterally to other departments, applying transferable skills to a variety of roles.
You could also follow this up by asking what the most popular paths are that employees follow within a department. It’s a promising sign if an interviewer not only provides a detailed explanation of what employees are doing now, but also lays out a process for how the company has helped employees get to their current positions.
Questions About Management and Leadership
17. What Do You Do to Foster an Inclusive Team?
A broader related question could be, “What is your company doing to encourage workplace diversity?”
When Park first applied to work at LaunchPad Lab, it was important to her to work for a company that emphasized diversity. She asked her interviewer about diversity statistics at the company, and found out that the team was mostly made up of white men, but her interviewer also mentioned that they were making efforts to make their team more inclusive. “In a case like that, I think it’s important to keep asking, ‘What are those efforts? What plans do you have to hire more diverse candidates?’” she said.
Being intentional with your questions pushes companies to be accountable and can get them to better focus on issues like diversity and inclusion that often get overlooked.
18. What Are the Strengths and Weaknesses of the Company’s Leadership?
It’s important to have a good understanding of how the company’s leadership works because their actions ultimately affect employees at all levels of the organization. Wiacek said related questions you can ask are “How long has the leadership been in place?” “What’s their leadership style?” “What are they really great at?” “What are their gaps?”
“You’ll want to understand the management style of the person who can make your life great or a miserable living hell,” Wiacek said.
19. How Do You Practice and Implement Your Company’s Values?
This question can provide a closer look at how authentic company executives are in practicing what the business preaches. It also shows how effective leaders and managers are in getting employees to buy into a company culture and abide by specific values. Strong, positive leadership by leaders at various levels of an organization is necessary for a company to have a thriving culture that everyone believes in.
20. What Excites You About the Company’s Direction?
It’s much easier to find purpose and growth at a company where leaders possess a clear vision for where they want to take the business moving forward. Asking about the company’s direction can lead to key intel on whether a company has goals and whether these goals align with yours.
Best Questions to Ask in an Interview By Situation
Asking questions relevant to your interview situation shows the interviewer you are both adaptable and focused on the details of the role at hand (and who is involved).
Here are some of the best questions to ask in an interview based on different situations:
Best Questions to Ask a Recruiter
Recruiters are often the interviewers in first or early-stage job interviews. They focus on general hiring logistics and ensure candidates are a good fit to continue in the interview process, so ask them questions related to role or hiring technicalities.
- What does the full interview process look like from here, and what is expected for next steps in the process?
- Why is this position open now?
- Based on the information about me and what we've discussed, is there anything about my background that gives you pause?
Best Questions to Ask a Hiring Manager
The hiring manager is likely your future boss in the workplace, so questions you ask them should prove you understand their basic team goals and that you are ready to achieve these goals through the role.
- What are the top goals you’d like someone in this role to achieve in their first six months?
- How would you describe your management style, and how does the team usually handle feedback?
- What is the biggest challenge the team is currently facing, and how can someone in this role help alleviate it?
Best Questions to Ask in a Final Interview
By the final interview round, the company knows you can do the job. So, questions to ask at this stage of the interview process should focus on long-term vision and how you will grow with the employer.
- How does this department contribute to the company’s overall strategic goals for the next 2 to 3 years?
- What is the most common reason people succeed in this company, and what is the most common reason they struggle?
- If I were to look back a year from now and be considered a successful hire, what would I have accomplished?
Best Questions to Ask for a Remote Job
Remote work requires a high level of trust and communication, so questions for a remote job role should ensure the company is able to effectively support employees regardless of location.
- How does the team handle communication and collaboration across different time zones?
- What tools or platforms do you use to facilitate remote collaboration?
- What are the expectations around working hours? Is work expected to be completed synchronously, asynchronously or within specific timeframes?
Questions Not to Ask in an Interview
While asking questions during a job interview shows curiosity and incentive, asking certain types of questions can give an employer the wrong impression.
These are a few majors questions to avoid asking in an interview:
1. What Exactly Does Your Company Do?
Asking this question suggests a lack of research and preparation for the interview, plus signals a lack of respect for the interviewer’s time. Research about a company and its mission should be conducted before attending an interview, and a candidate should be able to ask an interviewer more specific questions based on this information — not questions about this information.
Instead, ask:
“I saw your department’s project regarding [xyz]; how would you say this aligns with your department’s goals for this year?”
2. How Quickly Can I Get Promoted or Move to a Different Role?
Career ambition can be positive, though asking this type of question too early expresses that you are already looking past the job the company is needing to fill. It is paramount to show enthusiasm for the role you are applying for, rather than implying that you see the role as only a stepping stone in your career.
Instead, ask:
“What does success look like in this role over the first six months, and how has the team grown historically?”
3. How Much Vacation Time Do I Get, and Can I Take it Next Month?
Asking about paid time off (PTO), salary and other perks in a first job interview can show you are only concerned about what the company can do for you, rather than conveying what you can do for the company. Questions regarding benefits and perks are best reserved for final interviews, whereas early interview conversations should focus on how you can bring value to the role.
Instead, ask:
“Can you tell me about the company culture and how the team maintains a healthy work-life balance?”
Tips for Asking Questions in an Interview
Research the Company to Prepare Good Questions
Do your homework and learn about the company ahead of time, so you can get answers that are truly useful to you should you be faced with deciding whether or not to accept the job offer. Don’t ask questions you already know the answers to or could easily find from a Google search — your questions need to be well-thought-out and specific to the company and role you’re pursuing.
“I always do a ton of research into companies that I’m interviewing with, gathering as much as I can from their website and blog posts,” said Park. “I want to get a sense of the kind of people they hire. That usually gives me an idea of questions I want to ask.”
Ask All the Logistical Questions As Early as Possible
While it might seem poor form to ask about salary range in an early interview, experts are now saying it’s best to gather all of the important basic information as soon as possible. This saves everyone time if plans suddenly change or the expectations for compensation and benefits don’t align. These can be a part of the questions you ask during the interview, too.
Make sure you have answers to the following questions from interviewers before proceeding with late-stage interviews:
- How many interviews are there going to be?
- When are you expecting to have this role filled by?
- How is the title for this role determined?
- What are the day-to-day responsibilities of this role?
- How many hours a week would be spent working on certain tasks?
- What is the salary range?
- What are the benefits offered?
Ask 2 to 5 Questions at Every Interview
Typically, you should ask between two and five questions at every interview. You may not get a chance to ask them all, but it’s better to come prepared.
“It is a huge red flag whenever a job seeker comes into an interview and has no questions,” Valentin said. “It really doesn’t matter at what stage in the interview process you are.”
Frequently Asked Questions
What are common questions to ask in an interview?
Common questions for job candidates to ask in an interview include:
- Why is this position open now?
- What is unique about your company’s culture?
- What’s the biggest pain point your team is facing right now?
How many questions to ask at the end of an interview?
It’s best to prepare two to five questions to ask at the end of an interview, with the expectation that the recruiter may not have time to answer all of them.
