The last few minutes of an interview are critical

The first group has no questions for the panel. Not one question. Nothing. Unless they have already knocked my socks off or have been weaving their questions and clarifying statements in the dialogue all along, this person goes down several notches in my estimation.

Changing where you work or what you do is a big deal. And 99% of the time there is a huge amount of uncertainty. I struggle to understand how a candidate can get to this part of the interview and have literally no questions. I worry that if they have nothing that they are unsure or even curious about in this critical situation, how are they going to approach the inevitable ambiguity they face as a knowledge worker? Are they also going to ask no questions? That’s not the recipe for success, growth or good performance.

The second group asks a couple of questions, but the questions are so bad they would have been better off not asking them. You can see they are just asking questions in order to avoid being in the first group.

I’m struggling to come up with good examples of “bad” questions, but I think you kind of know it when you hear it. Sometimes the question reflects badly because it doesn’t make sense. You sit there and start worrying that they don’t have half a clue which job they are applying for. A terrible question can sometimes tell you more about how a candidate is going to perform on the job than any of the answers they gave earlier.

The third group asks good questions and they ask them well. Good questions are the ones that build on what is already known and understood. They use the job description, the publicly available information about the company and the dialogue from the interview itself as a launchpad for further clarification and detail.

One example of a good question would be: “I know from your website that you sell product lines A and B in region X and Y. And the job description said this position will be focusing on a subset of the business. But it didn’t specify if the sales team members divide their focus by product or region?” Unless you have already bombed the interview, you just jumped to the top of my list!

I did an interview this week and really liked one of the questions the candidate asked. They said: “What are the common traits among top performers in your department?”. This question told me a lot about the candidate. It was relevant and articulate but also revealed a desire to excel. This is an invaluable character trait in any team member. If you are interested, below are the 3 things I told them are common among the members of my staff that are setting the example:

1. They all approach their work in a way that blurs the lines between business and IT.
2. They all contribute to the performance of their team (not lone rangers).
3. They all get along at least reasonably well with their colleagues.