As almost everybody knows, there comes a time in almost every interview where the hiring manager or recruiter finishes with their own agenda — and asks the candidate across the desk “so do you have any questions for us?”

These moments represent a “prime time” moment in most interviews, since they give candidates a golden opportunity to set themselves apart from the competition and demonstrate their interest, enthusiasm, and curiosity about the job to the employer in question.  And yet, my take on this issue seems to be demonstrably different than a lot of the advice given out there by many career experts and that one would find on most career websites.  In most cases, when researching the topic of interview questions, you’ll be bombarded with a long list of suggestions such as the following:

“What are you hoping the ideal candidate will accomplish in the first 90 days?”
“How would you describe the company’s culture?”
“What are the biggest challenges the company is facing right now?”
“How will success be measured in this position?”
“How does this position contribute to the company overall?”
“What does a typical day or week look like in this role?”
“Do you feel I’m missing any key credentials essential to succeeding in this role?

Now don’t get me wrong, any of these questions are better than nothing — and would certainly work fine, in a pinch — but to me, they’re missing two critical elements.  Authenticity and originality.  Simply put, if the whole goal of an interview is for a manager and potential employee to get to know each other, and thoroughly explore whether the candidate would be a good fit, it seems logically flawed that a person could ever plan the best questions for such a situation in advance.

To put it another way, if one arrives at an interview already hell-bent on asking a series of pre-planned questions, it implies that the content of the entire interviewing conversation didn’t really  matter.  The candidate didn’t really listen to the manager’s needs, they didn’t process or analyze what they heard, and they didn’t use their critical thinking skills to come up with original, spontaneous questions deriving from the discussion itself — showing the interviewer that the would-be employee tracked the dialogue carefully and paid close attention to the details.

In other words, as opposed to a formulaic question one could ask in any interview, I think a lot more value gets added by asking questions like:

“Martha, can we go back to about 20 minutes ago when you said you need to find somebody with excellent Microsoft Excel skills?  Can you tell me more about how Excel would be used in this role and what specific advanced features a person would need to be proficient in?  Would they need to be building pivot tables, for example, or possibly need to know how to run VLOOKUPS and do conditional formatting, perhaps?”

“Bob, you seemed to have a lot of energy around the topic of working effectively across departments and the importance of hiring somebody with really good influencing skills.  Can you tell me more about the specific challenges the person you bring on board will be facing in this regard?  Is there a certain department they might need to rebuild some trust with?  Or have certain projects been getting stuck due to some political friction or turf battles in this regard?  I’d love to know a little more about what’s taking place, since I’ve had a lot of success in past roles building positive working relationships within internal groups and influencing people even when I don’t have direct authority over them…”

See the difference?  See how these kinds of questions not only prove to the employer you listened carefully to their every word, but also give you a great opportunity to show off your smarts, curiosity, and confidence that you can solve the issues in play?

On top of this, while 20+ years ago the “canned” questions I listed at the top of the article weren’t all that well-known, virtually every job candidate now does a few minutes of web surfing on the subject of interviewing and therefore tends to ask the exact same questions when given the chance.  So when the end of the interview arrives and it’s truly the moment to shine, most candidates just shift into reciting a series of tired, cliched, and memorized questions that the manager has probably heard almost verbatim from the last four or five people who came through the door.  Again, you just become a “me too” candidate instead of engaging the manager in a way that makes you stand out and leaves the discussion on a triumphant high note.

So again, maybe it’s just my own personal pet peeve, but I think the time has come to rebound from some of the formulaic advice about interviewing that now saturates the Internet.  Don’t approach the interview as a “test” or a “audition” where the goal is to memorize your lines, in advance, and give a stellar performance.  View it instead as a problem-solving conversation where you and the employer talk through the needs of the role, together, and you simply ask the natural questions that would come to mind based on what you heard from the person across the desk — digging into whatever additional points of clarification you feel will fully help you understand what the job entails and whether you can successfully address the employer’s pain points.

A radical concept, I realize, but I stand by it! :)