Questions to ask an interviewee

You are the one asking. The interviewee is the person across the table, and your job in the next hour is to leave with evidence rather than an impression. Most question lists hand you a hundred prompts and no read, which is why interviews run long and still end in a coin toss. Below are the questions worth an hour, what each answer actually tells you, and the follow-up that gets past the prepared version.

The questions, and what each answer tells you

Nineteen questions, grouped by the signal they produce. You will not use all of them. Take two from each group that matter for the role you are filling and leave room for the follow-ups, because the follow-up is where the evidence is.

Opening the conversation

Warm-ups with a purpose. Score them, do not skip them.

Walk me through what you own today, and what would break next week if you stopped.: What it tells you: The second half is the one that matters. People who own real scope answer it instantly and narrowly. People who have been near the work describe the team’s remit and never get down to their own.; Follow up with: Who would pick it up, and how long before they were dangerous?
What made you take your current job, and what has changed since?: What it tells you: You are listening for a decision process. Somebody who cannot explain why they took the last job will not be able to explain why they took yours, and that is the shape of an offer that gets dropped in week three of notice.; Follow up with: What did you turn down at the time?

Ownership and scope

Tell me about something you built or fixed that is still in use.: What it tells you: Durability separates delivery from activity. Anything still running has survived people who did not build it, which means it was documented, handed over, or simple enough to keep alive.; Follow up with: Who runs it now, and what did they have to change?
What in your current role did nobody ask you to do?: What it tells you: The gap between the job description and the job. Strong hires answer with something unglamorous they noticed and fixed. Weaker ones answer with an initiative that had a launch.
Tell me about a target you missed.: What it tells you: An answer with no missed targets means either the targets were soft or you are being managed. Both are worth knowing before the offer.; Follow up with: When did you know you were going to miss it, and who did you tell first?

Judgement with incomplete information

Describe a decision you made without the information you wanted.: What it tells you: Whether they can act. Listen for what they did to reduce the uncertainty cheaply before deciding, and for whether they named a condition that would reverse it.; Follow up with: What would have had to be true for you to decide the other way?
What did you believe about this work two years ago that you no longer believe?: What it tells you: Updating. Anybody doing real work has been structurally wrong about something. A candidate with no answer has either stopped paying attention or will not be wrong in front of you, and the second is the more expensive one in a team.
Tell me about the last time you told somebody senior they were wrong.: What it tells you: How they escalate. "It never came up" is an answer. What you want is the sequence: what they said, who they said it to, and what happened next.; Follow up with: What did it cost you?

How they work with other people

Who is the hardest person you have worked well with, and what did you change to make it work?: What it tells you: The pivot is "what did you change". A candidate who locates the entire problem in the other person is telling you how your team will hear their feedback.
Whose work made yours possible in the last year?: What it tells you: Credit. Cheap to fake and rarely faked, because people who have never thought about it pause first. The pause is the signal.
Tell me about feedback that stung and turned out to be right.: What it tells you: Two things at once: that they receive feedback, and that they can describe themselves accurately without performing humility.; Follow up with: What did you do differently the following month?

The actual work

These change with the role. The shape does not: ask about the work in front of them, not about their philosophy of the work.

Here is a real problem we have this quarter. How would you start?: What it tells you: The best twenty minutes available to you. You are watching them ask questions before answering, which is the behaviour you are buying.; Follow up with: What would you need from us in the first fortnight to do that?
What would you change in your first ninety days, and what would you deliberately leave alone?: What it tells you: The second half again. Anybody can list changes. Restraint is the rarer signal and the one that predicts whether a senior hire lands or detonates.
What part of this role are you least looking forward to?: What it tells you: Every job has a part nobody wants. A candidate who says there is not one has either not read the role or is not being straight, and both surface in month three.

Motivation, and the offer

Ask these in the interview rather than at the offer stage, when it is too late to act on the answer.

What else are you looking at, and where are you in those processes?: What it tells you: Your actual timeline. This is the question that stops an offer being built on a guess, and it is asked far too late in most processes.
What would make you say no to us?: What it tells you: The real objection, offered early, while you can still do something about it. People answer this more honestly than they answer "do you have any concerns".
Who else has a say in this decision?: What it tells you: A partner, a co-founder, a current manager with a counter ready. Offers get dropped by people who were never in the room.
If your employer counters, what would the counter have to contain?: What it tells you: Whether the reason for leaving is fixable with money. If it is, the counter will fix it, and you will find that out on the joining date.

Closing

What did you expect me to ask that I did not?: What it tells you: Better than "any questions for me", because it surfaces the thing they prepared and never got to use, and occasionally surfaces the thing they were relieved you missed.

Questions that feel useful and are not

The question

What it buys you

What is your greatest weakness?

It has one acceptable answer and every candidate has rehearsed it. You learn how well somebody prepares for interviews, which is a hiring signal only if the job is interviewing.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

It asks for a prediction nobody can make and rewards whoever is most willing to flatter your org chart. If you want a tenure signal, ask what would make them leave in year two.

Why do you want to work here?

The answer is on your careers page and they have read it. Ask what they would want to change here instead, which cannot be prepared from public material.

Tell me about yourself.

Useful as a warm-up and useless as evidence, because it is the one prompt everybody has scripted. Keep it if it settles nerves. Do not score it.

Sell me this pen, and other puzzles.

Puzzle questions measure exposure to puzzles. If the role involves selling, ask them to sell what you actually sell, to you, with your real objections.

What is your current salary?

It tells you what a previous employer paid, not what this person is worth, and asking is restricted in a number of jurisdictions. Ask for their expectation, state your band, and find out early whether the two meet.

The follow-up is where the evidence is

A prepared candidate has three or four polished stories, and any single question can be answered with one of them. The story survives the first question and rarely survives the third. These follow-ups work on almost any answer.

Ask for the timeline. When it started, when they knew, when it ended. Constructed stories have no dates.
Ask who disagreed. Real projects have somebody who wanted it done differently, and a person who was actually there can name them and characterise the objection fairly.
Ask what it cost. Every real decision traded something away. An answer with no cost is a summary of a slide rather than a memory.
Ask what happened after they left. It separates the person who built something durable from the person who was standing next to it at launch.
Ask for the number. Not to check it, to see whether they know it. People who owned an outcome remember its size.
Ask what they would do differently, then ask why they did not do it that way at the time. The real constraint appears in the second answer.
Leave four seconds of silence. The addendum somebody volunteers to fill it is regularly the most useful sentence in the hour.

Write the score before you leave the room

The questions are half the instrument. The other half is the ten minutes after the interview, and that is where most teams lose the evidence. Score against the profile agreed before sourcing started, not against the last person you met.

Write your scores before you speak to another interviewer. Once you have heard somebody else’s read, you no longer have an independent one to contribute.
Score the evidence, not the answer. "Named the tradeoff, could not say who owned the decision" is usable in a debrief. "Strong communicator" is not.
Use an even number of bands. A midpoint is where an interviewer who was not paying full attention parks a candidate, and a debrief full of midpoints is a meeting with no information in it.
Record the question you did not get to. On a close call, the gap in your evidence is more useful than another opinion.
Decide the disqualifiers in advance and honour them. A disqualifier that survives one exception was a preference.

Questions to leave out entirely

Some questions carry risk and buy no signal at all. They surface most often in unstructured interviews, where the interviewer is filling silence rather than testing anything, which is one more argument for deciding your questions before the meeting.

Marital status, children, or plans to have them. It predicts nothing about the work and it is the most common way an otherwise careful process creates a claim.
Age, or proxies for it such as graduation year, where the role does not require it.
Religion, caste, community, or national origin.
Health or disability, other than a direct question about performing a specific stated duty with reasonable accommodation.
Anything about a protected characteristic dressed up as culture fit. If you cannot say which requirement of the job a question tests, it is not a question, it is a risk.

Employment law differs by country and by state. Where you are unsure, take the question to counsel rather than into the interview.

How many questions fit in an hour

Five or six, probed properly. Teams that plan fifteen questions ask fifteen questions, hear fifteen prepared answers, and book another interview to find out what they missed. Interview load is usually a symptom of shallow questioning rather than of thorough process, and it compounds: every extra round is another set of calendars and another week in which a competing offer can close.

What this looked like on a real role

4 disciplines

sales, clinical, AI, and marketing, through one function

A founder hiring across sales, clinical, AI and marketing had no single playbook covering the range, and was the bottleneck on all four searches. The reading and the screening stayed inside the function and the founder entered at the decision, which is the only part of an interview loop a founder should be spending an hour on.

Read the iHealD engagement in full

Before you redesign the loop, put a number on what the current one costs in interviewer hours: run it through the hiring efficiency analyzer.

How Continuity1 runs this funnel

The screening above is the job. These are the numbers it produces when a function owns it end to end, set against the published benchmarks for the same market.

The questions above are the second half of the job. The first half is who ends up in the room, and that is what these numbers measure.

~3: Interviews your team sits in, per hire; Ashby puts technical roles at 17.6 interviews per hire across the whole process, up 52% since 2021. The rest of that load sits with the function, not with you.; Ashby talent-trends report
1 in 3: Shortlisted candidates you meet who become the hire; Aligned engagements run nearer 1 in 2, distant ones nearer 1 in 10. The market takes about 180 applicants to make one hire, and that sifting lands on your team rather than ours.; Continuity1 tracked engagements
1 in 9: Accepted offers that ghost before joining; Indian employers report nearly 4 in 10 offers dropped. We lose 1 in 9.; nasscom community
95%: Offers that close inside your stated band; 20 of the last 21. A flat fee earns nothing from an inflated offer; a percentage of CTC earns more.; Continuity1 tracked engagements

Every brief becomes a success profile before sourcing starts, calibrated with the people who will manage the role. That calibration is the step most hiring skips, and it is why a shortlist either matches the job or matches the job advert.

You review a scored shortlist and make the calls. The filtering never lands on your calendar.

Share a role See the workings and the citations

Questions teams ask

What is the difference between an interviewee and an interviewer?

The interviewee is the candidate, the person answering. The interviewer is the person asking, which on this page is you. It matters because most published question lists are written for the candidate preparing answers, and a list of answers is no use to the person who has to decide.

How many questions should I prepare for one interview?

Prepare eight and expect to ask five or six. The follow-ups take longer than the questions and the follow-ups are where the evidence is. Anything you do not reach belongs to the next interviewer, written down, so that nobody asks it twice.

Should every interviewer ask the same questions?

The same primary question for the same competency, so that two candidates are comparable. Different interviewers should own different competencies, so that a candidate is not asked about the same project four times and rewarded for the fourth, best-rehearsed telling of it.

What should I ask a candidate with no direct experience?

Ask for the closest analogue, then probe the transfer. What is the hardest thing you have done that resembles this, and what would be different here? Somebody stepping up can usually name the differences accurately, and that accuracy is the evidence you are looking for.

How do I stop candidates giving rehearsed answers?

You cannot, and you should not try. Let the prepared story run, then ask for dates, for the person who disagreed, for what it cost, and for what happened after they left. Preparation survives the first question. It rarely survives the third.

Do I have to ask everybody the same questions to be fair?

Within a competency, yes, and you should score them on the same written scale before speaking to anyone else. Consistency is what makes two candidates comparable, and comparability is what stops a decision defaulting to whoever was interviewed most recently.