Go-to interview questions for when you have run out of questions

August 18, 2021 1:58 PM

I have recently started being included in interviewing job candidates for my department for the first time. I have done a few and it seems like no matter how many questions I try to prep in advance I always awkwardly run out of them at the end. Do you have any general go-to's that you keep in your back pocket that always elicit something useful?

This is for design positions at a software company, so I try to come up with a bunch of design and process-focused questions and tailor it somewhat based on the presentation that the candidate gives to the department beforehand. But for general stuff like "Why do you want to work here?" and "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" I shy away from because I hate asking people things that I hate being asked.

I was wondering if you have any sure-fire general questions other than the obvious ones that are all over google?

posted by bleep to Work & Money (40 answers total)

Why this job?

Why you?

Tell me about a time when you had to be a leader, what went wrong, what you did and, based on what you experienced and what you learned what you would have done differently?
posted by parmanparman at 2:14 PM on August 18, 2021

I always* ask people why they went to college where they did. I started because it's just something I'm interested in, but I kept asking it because I found the answers illustrative of other personality traits. For example, the first guy I asked answered "because my mom told me I had to either go to college or get a real job, and this was the closest college". Completely aside from the fact that he went to my alma mater, which I love dearly, this is just not a professional response, and doesn't reflect well. We don't want employees whose mothers have to tell them what to do. I asked another person, incidentally also from my alma mater, and she gave a really thoughtful and yet obviously unrehearsed about older friends of hers she'd visited there, and how it made the campus feel familiar and welcoming, and that it was close enough to home so that she could still see her family (to whom she was close) but far enough away that she could establish herself independently, and so on. Obviously we didn't hire her just for that, she was well-qualified in the things that matter as well, but being able to answer that way really made a good impression, which turned out to be accurate. She's still with that company eight years later, having been promoted a couple of times. So yeah, it's a question that nobody really prepares for, and it's hard to BS through, so it's a quick test of seeing how people think in conversation, which is a useful skill for the positions I've had a hand in interviewing for.


*Saying "always" makes it sound like I've interviewed more than like five people LOL.
posted by kevinbelt at 2:16 PM on August 18, 2021 [9 favorites]

My approach always was (I don't have to do interviews anymore, thank goodness) to get an idea of the all-aroundness of the person. So I would ask things like:
-- "What are you reading?" or "What are the last couple of books you've read?"
-- "What do you do for recreation and relaxation outside of work?"
-- "What are your favorite places in [name of city or area]?"
posted by beagle at 2:19 PM on August 18, 2021

Me! I interview for design roles! And I love doing job interviews (on both sides, I know, I'm a monster) so I'll tell you what I'm asking about right now:

• Collaboration processes and tools: assuming the candidate has been working remotely, how have they been collaborating with team members? What has worked and what hasn't? Pet peeves? Thoughts on Miro vs. Mural vs. Figjam THE FINAL BATTLE?
• What's the most fun thing for you to do at work? What's your favorite part about your job? This one seems like a trick question (you might have to say it's not a trick question? Is that worse?) but it's really just an interesting thing to know. Relationships? That locked-in flow state before you look at the clock and realize how late it is? An empty document just waiting for you to fill it? Calling HR on your coworkers? It's good information to have about someone!
• Some questions about a given project: what was the hardest thing about it? What do you think you'd do differently?
• How do you like to find out about what's going on in design -- Twitter? Local events? Books? Podcasts? What's your favorite ----?

posted by chesty_a_arthur at 2:20 PM on August 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

I was interviewing for a substantially more creative field but I had great success with "If you had to give a five-minute impromptu presentation on any topic of your choice, not necessarily having anything at all to do with this job or field, what would it be?"
posted by babelfish at 2:29 PM on August 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

"We don't want employees whose mothers have to tell them what to do."

What was he at the time? 17? 18?

The best interviews are civilized conversations, which makes the candidate actually speak comfortably enough to show a bit of their personality. Period. Not a barrage of questions which need to be answered in some sort of schematic way in order to jump through this round of hoops.
posted by Violet Blue at 2:36 PM on August 18, 2021 [34 favorites]

- What are your favorite tools or design resources? (even if you don't end up hiring them, you might learn some useful information to help you in your career)
- A riff on the above is: what are some of your favorite phone apps that you can't live without?*
- What was your best/worst job and what made it great/difficult? (assuming the person has had more than 2 jobs before)
- What is something you've always wanted to do but never had the opportunity to do in your previous jobs?

Try to get the candidate talking about something they care about, you'll learn more about what interests and motivates them. It gives you room to have an actual conversation so you're not quickly running out of things to talk about.

However, you do want to be smart about what and how you ask, since the goal is evaluating someone for a job and not if you'll be buddies or to obtain information that is illegal to ask for directly (for example in the US, if they are married, their religious beliefs, etc.)

*I work in video games, so my guess is this info is relevant to the general field you're working in.
posted by Goblin Barbarian at 2:37 PM on August 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

- What website(s) do you look at first thing in the morning? Do you contribute content or just read it?
- Tell me about a thing (gadget, website, book, idea, concept, group) that not many people know about but you find really interesting or useful.

I like it when candidates have some innate sense of curiosity or a personal want to contribute/participate. There should be something up here that makes their eyes light up and it should be easy to answer and share. Asking these kinds of questions and getting a shrug in response is a red flag to me.
posted by JoeZydeco at 2:46 PM on August 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

What questions do you have for me?
posted by TurkishGolds at 2:51 PM on August 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

For the love, don’t ask people why they chose the school they went to. For many people the answer is “because that is what I could afford” and they aren’t going to want to say that to a stranger interviewing them for a job. The best case scenario is that they will have to come up with some other bs reason on the fly, and that wastes everyone’s time. Questions like that get into all kinds of weird classist garbage that you should steer well clear of.
posted by cakelite at 3:00 PM on August 18, 2021 [70 favorites]

Yes to TurkishGolds, I always leave at least ten minutes at the end of an hour long interview or at least five minutes for half hour interviews to let them ask me questions. You can tell a lot about the type of person they are and how they are considering the company by the questions they ask.
posted by umwhat at 3:00 PM on August 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

From the other side of the hiring table, I hate when interviewers just continue with the job description. Tell me about what the day to day is like, offer up information about how people handle stress or bush times. I’d like to ask that question but frankly I usually really need the job I’m interviewing for so I don’t get to ask questions like that.

Perhaps something related to the job or company environment like “what management style do you prefer?”

What do I like to do in my free time? Not be at work. That’s great if sometimes I grab a drink with colleagues but honestly I have enough friends and I don’t actually want to tell you much about my personal life. For women with children this can also a can of worms where you’re low key asking if they have kids or not which is a big problem in an interview.

I’d scour the askamanager.com website. It’s a phenomenal website.
posted by raccoon409 at 3:06 PM on August 18, 2021 [16 favorites]

Your questions should have goals in terms of evaluating how the candidate aligns with the job criteria and not overlapping with questions for other people on the slate...but it sounds like your company may not have a super rigorously designed interview process, it happens.

Here are some questions I find useful in evaluating people for any role. They are kind of softball open ended questions that don't have a single right or a wrong answer, but you want to see answers that align with the role and skillset you are looking to hire for. They are questions that work for almost any role:

What motivates you?
Based on your own self-assessment, peer feedback, and past performance reviews, what are you really good at?
Why are you looking for a job? Why now? Why us and why this role?
What would your ideal next job look like?
posted by phoenixy at 3:09 PM on August 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

First, I ask "Describe something that you worked on that you're proud of". Dig into why it's something they care about, what they individually did, what it meant in the context of the broader team/product, etc. Most people are happy to big up their own achievements, but the key here is to get them to explain why it was valuable to customers/end-users, and how they worked with others to do it.

Then, I ask "If you were doing this again, what would you do differently?". A good candidate will reflect on what they've learned, the compromises made because of circumstances, the benefit of 20:20 hindsight and go on to (hopefully blamelessly) identify concrete points at which things could have gone better, and - importantly - how doing things differently might have been better for the customer/end-user.
posted by parm at 3:18 PM on August 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

My final question is usually “Is there anything you want us to know about you that you haven’t had a chance to say yet?”
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 3:22 PM on August 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

When you don't know the answer to a question, what resources do you use online to solve those problems?

Besides paying you money, what's the most enjoyable thing previous managers did for you at your last jobs?
posted by bbqturtle at 3:22 PM on August 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

What's something you want to make sure we know about you that hasn't come out in earlier questions?
posted by BlahLaLa at 3:48 PM on August 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is a great set of stock questions including well-explained rubrics for the answers: “Explain a Topic At Multiple Levels…”, “Tell Me About a Project You Led…”, etc.
posted by caek at 3:55 PM on August 18, 2021

The main thing to internalize is that the purpose of the interview is to distinguish good candidates from bad candidates. It's not to find out interesting stuff about the candidates, or to see if you vibe personality-wise, or to figure out if they fit some predetermined profile, or to fill time (unless you've explicitly decided you need to spend ten minutes giving the candidate a bit of a breather or whatever).

In almost all cases, if you run out of directed questions, that means you've failed to prepare properly as an interviewer. Which happens, of course - interviewing is a skill you pick up just like any other - but you should recognize it as an error and work to avoid it in the future. You may of course happen to hear something useful if you're asking uncontrolled questions, like that the candidate lets his mom make life decisions for him, but it's not a good investment of what's typically extremely limited time.

The correct way to interview is to come up with a list of soft and hard skills the candidate needs to have to be successful in the position, and then ask them either experiential ("Tell me about a time when you ...") questions or to actually demonstrate the skill for you. If you have a good list this should be much longer than the time you have available, and you'll need to prioritize and coordinate with other interviewers to avoid duplicating work. (If you can't come up with a good list, you may not have enough knowledge about the position to be interviewing for it.)

As a last tip, if you're a new interviewer, you should ask to sit in on other interviews and watch them, and then debrief with the interviewer afterwards. It is very interesting to see how different people are in their styles and approaches.
posted by inkyz at 3:59 PM on August 18, 2021 [16 favorites]

Not being cheeky: if you’ve run out of questions, the interview is done. Filler questions are agonizing for everyone.

So my suggestion is really to make sure you prepare ahead of time so you know you’re asking the right questions. Think of what the role requires, review their materials, write down what you want to ask so you hit them all. Lighter questions are good, frivolous or impossible questions suck, and there’s no shame in confidently ending the interview when it’s over.

Most candidates will ask about next steps so clarifying that’s a good way to really end it and punctuate it if you’re not sure.
posted by kapers at 4:00 PM on August 18, 2021 [9 favorites]

“Tell me what drew you to this role” is a better way to ask “why do you want to work here”—much more open-ended. Most of us don’t really speak this way so I can understand why it’s awkward; writing them down will help. Practice saying “tell me about...” instead of barking who what when where why sorts of questions.

But please, no filler or gimmicks.
posted by kapers at 4:05 PM on August 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

What is the last new thing you learned and how did you learn it?
posted by shesbookish at 4:35 PM on August 18, 2021

Keep in mind that during the interview, the candidate is also interviewing the company. Asking questions that are irrelevant to the position, ignorant of the candidate, or simply inappropriate will give the candidate a negative opinion of the company.

An interview that goes on too long is an insult to the candidate's time and also shows that the interviewee has nothing else going on.

If you don't know what you should be asking, talk to the other people in your company and see what they are asking. Talk to the hiring manager and see what kind of traits they need in a candidate. Talk to people who the candidate would work with and see what they need.
posted by meowzilla at 5:11 PM on August 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Brainstorm the top 3 behaviors a person truly needs to be successful there. Be honest. Do they need to be socially savvy, independently make decisions and cut corners? Ask them a behavioral question tailored to suss that out: “tell me
About a time where you had to sense the opinions of a group without asking directly” or whatever.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 5:50 PM on August 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Also I went to university in my hometown because I was too terrified to be independent and move away after a traumatic upbringing and needed to stay in the same city as a close friend for support while living on my own and would die of shame to be asked that in an interview ymmv
posted by St. Peepsburg at 5:51 PM on August 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

-- "What are you reading?" or "What are the last couple of books you've read?"
-- "What do you do for recreation and relaxation outside of work?"

We quit asking questions like this because we were concerned that people would feel like they had to have some kind of "correct" answers and because the answers would really have nothing to do with the job.

And honestly, don't judge people based on how they made decisions when they were 17.
posted by FencingGal at 5:55 PM on August 18, 2021 [16 favorites]

If you have nothing else to ask, stop asking questions. Don't torture someone further just to fill time.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 6:05 PM on August 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

Not in your field, but these are a couple of my go-to questions:

Is there anything you are currently working on for your professional development?
--Can show how much a candidate has curiosity/openness/desire to grow, esp if they answer excitedly about a person they are shadowing, training module they are taking, etc. Also can be a backdoor into the whole "what is your greatest weakness" question, but only if they choose to interpret it that way.

What do you enjoy about your current role, and what could you do without? (assuming they are currently working)
--Can help give a sense of whether they will be happy in the role they are applying for in addition to what kind of workflows they will thrive with
posted by dede at 6:59 PM on August 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

I learned this from a Little Free Library book and tested it on my partner. It works great. If you want to know more because I botched the description, I can go dig the book of my outbound pile and get you the title and/or mail it to you.

Go through every single job on the resume from oldest to most recent, and ask them how they really shined in that role, and an honest answer for what they could have done better. After each answer, use brief statements or questions to prompt them to continue telling you more.
posted by aniola at 8:25 PM on August 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

What gives you energy at work? When you're in the zone what are you doing?
posted by brookeb at 9:07 PM on August 18, 2021

Interviewing for journalism, not for jobs, but:

Is there anything you wish I had asked you?
Is there anything you'd like to add?
posted by athirstforsalt at 9:15 PM on August 18, 2021

I like:

What did you like least about your last job?
How do you make a decision that is hard to make?
What part of the job sounds the hardest to you?

I like the last one the best at the end because you get some idea of what they understand about the role. The more they understand the hardest part for them, the better suited they are to the role (I think).
posted by vunder at 9:27 PM on August 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

What are you reading right now?
Who is the smartest person you know? Why? (Can’t say mom or dad)
What is the one thing I would never guess about you from your resuMe
WHats your best dish?
Trump?
If you could wake up tomorrow with a new skill, what would it be? (Also good as an ice breaker to kick off meetings)
Do you have any outstanding warrants?
What advice would you give your previous boss?
Have you donated blood?
Do you know cpr?
posted by pmaxwell at 9:48 PM on August 18, 2021

I am not a designer but I have hired designers; my favorite thing to do is deep dive into a project that's in the portfolio. With a good candidate you can go arbitrarily deep. It's not about doing a critique, it's about understanding the process that led them to the outcome they got.

- Tell me about what the client wanted. Did they know what they wanted? How did this change over the course of the project?
- What was an idea that you pitched for this that they didn't like? How did you work together to come up with a good outcome?
- What was a tricky part of the project and how did you deal with it?
- If you were to go back and do it over, what would you do differently?

If you're a "cooperative overlapper" (or like me just have to restrain yourself from talking), here's another trick. After the candidate answers, count to five before asking the next question. There's a good chance they're not done yet! And if you give them more space, they could bring up something interesting that could take you in a whole new direction.
posted by goingonit at 10:14 PM on August 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

I think you should be careful about asking people what they are reading or what they do for a hobby. This assumes that people have free time in which to pursue these types of interests which may unintentionally skew male and childless, and probably upper middle class. Surely what they do in their free time is not really your business and I know that when I was a mum of small children, working my butt off to do my actual job well, I resented the implication that not doing these things should make me less employable.
posted by jojobobo at 1:02 AM on August 19, 2021 [14 favorites]

I was working in a small in-house creative group at a software company, and we were hiring a new webmaster. We wanted to make sure whomever we hired would fit in with the group. As in: Shares our senses of humor, etc. So, after going through the usual questions, we hit anyone who we thought was a good prospect with our final question: How are you with filling-out TPS reports?

The person we hired immediately explained the importance of cover sheets.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:09 AM on August 19, 2021

I'm retired, but I used to like two (series of) questions.

Who do you report to at your present job? What is her/his job title? What does she/he do?

This is less about the answer than revealing the applicant's perspective on work, organization, etc. Also it can sometimes uncover resume inflation, when the boss does at least some of the things the applicant claims to do.

What's a typical day at your current job?

Again, this is less about the specifics of the answer than showing how the applicant thinks about work.
posted by tmdonahue at 5:41 AM on August 19, 2021

I second what ThatCanadianGirl mentioned -- asking the candidate what questions they have for you. For me, this has really helped pull people away from the pack. Some people have very obviously cared / prepared, found out a lot about the company, and want to know more about the proposed job and how it would work. Others basically have....nothing. Whether or not they have questions - and what those questions are - can be really revealing of how they think, how organized they are, and what they consider to be appropriate interaction styles.
posted by sonofsnark at 9:16 AM on August 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

What's a mistake you made in your previous position and what did you learn from it?
posted by wittgenstein at 1:10 PM on August 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

I have learned a lot from two general questions:

1. What is your ideal boss/working environment like? (This one is particularly useful for hiring managers who will be working with the candidate, for example in assessing how independently a person wants to work, how much interaction they need, etc..)

2. How did you prepare for this interview, e.g. who did you talk to, what did you read? (This gives you a good insight into how seriously the person has taken the process and how they think about things. If they say they didn't prepare, or that they overprepared, or claim to have researched things that weren't reflected in their answers, you know to dig further.)
posted by rpfields at 5:33 PM on August 19, 2021 [1 favorite]