www.fastcompany.com: When you’re interviewing for a position at a new company, you often have the chance to meet some current employees. In those interactions, you want to get as much information about what it is like to work there.
What questions should you be asking?
15 comments:
This article explicates a problem I've been struggling with for as long as I've been searching and interviewing for jobs: what questions do you ask in order to get a realistic sense of what it would be like to work for the company? Failure to get a good grasp on that before signing on to a new job has lead to a great deal of frustration and disappointment for me over the years. I have a couple of follow-up questions, though. First: to whom should you be directing these questions? Second, and this is highly critical for me: if you discover or suspect that your prospective employers are not trustworthy, would that not be an automatic disqualifier? If you aren't sure you can trust their answers to your questions, there's no point in worrying about whether you'll be able to grow and learn. In the article, however, trust seems to carry an equal weight to the others.
I learned so much from this article. Searching and interviewing for jobs, I have questions that I want to ask and have an idea of the answers that would push me towards taking that job. I think that it is important to know that these questions should be asked to help make better decisions and avoid frustrations in the future. But, people have different experiences when working with a company and sometimes one can get bombarded with information that one doesn't necessarily need. There are good and bad sides to this but the good outweighs the bad.
This is a great way to frame the important things to look for in a company, but I struggle still with the framing of how to get the stories and answers that the article says you can get from the bigger questions. If I walk into a company and look at an employee and go “is this a company where you feel like you can grow and can you give me an example of a time where you or another employee was able to do so?” it’s easy to get the generic “yes of course!” answer that you would get from asking “Do you enjoy working here?” If you’re at the point in the interview process where you are being able to ask potential colleagues that will be on your same level when you walk in about the company culture, etc. they are still employees who have been vetted by management to give “Appropriate” answers to such direct questions. I would’ve loved to have seen some suggestions on how to “ask” without “asking” in this article to help avoid the obvious answers. No way is going to be fool-proof, I suppose. But it would’ve been nice all the same!
I think these three questions are important to get answered before you decide to work for a company, but I am not sure if these are questions you can come right out and ask a potential employer. I am sure it is fine to ask whether there is room to grow in a company and what the mentoring programs look like, but I think if you are going to ask those questions, you would be less generic if you asked them in a unique way that still answered you question. As for asking an employee if they trust a company seems a little out there to me. I think that if you found a way of rephrasing that question as one that gives you more information on the companies values, it would be much more accepted and you would be at a lesser risk to hear personal opinion.
I’ve been thinking about this kind of stuff a lot recently since I’m looking at where I want to work after I graduate. In interviews I tend to ask people “what is your favorite project you’ve worked on at [company]?” and “what do you like most about [company]?”. I ask the first question because I can try to get a read on how excited they seem about the projects they work on, and the second because it both tells me what they consider best about the company and tells me what they value (which is important since whoever they are is usually going to be my boss). After reading this I might add “what is the most important thing you’ve learned while working at [company]?” or something else to get an idea of potential growth. It feels rather daunting to try to be getting a feel for a place I plan to commit a significant amount of time to without being able to really go there and experience it first.
This article really provided some insightful opinions on what to look for when interviewing. I don’t know if I agree with some of the generalizations of the article because in general I think everyone has different desires when trying to find a job. That being said they certainly bring up valuable points for the typical employee if they are looking at a long term commitment to the company. I did find myself a little disappointed in the article because they brought up really great points but fell a little flat when it came to introducing those points in the context of the situation you would be in, in an interview setting. Blatantly asking someone what their biggest mistake has been while working here could come off as a bit strange and aggressive. It would have been nice to receive some questions, techniques, or tools to work this sort of information into the conversation, there’s nothing wrong with being upfront, but we need to be careful about being rude.
This is a part of interviews that I personally always struggle with! It can be SO awkward when this portion of an interview arrives, especially if you have, as I often do, already done your homework and know a lot about the organization as a whole. I really liked the suggestions that they presented to help find out more about the working environment and the interworking’s of the organization that aren’t common knowledge or easily accessible on the worldwide internet. This is also a good opportunity to find out more about your boss and their personality based on the kinds of responses which they give. I have on occasion found a good question or two that have opened up a more comfortable side of my interviewer that was telling and eventually motivating in whether or not I wanted to work at that organization. All in all I think that a lot can come from just a little more thought into this portion of interviews.
I was hoping for more out of this article. When the end of the interview comes around and the employer asks you for questions, I always go blank and ask something stupid. The three general questions this article gives are good and insightful, however not the most appropriate for my current career I believe. I also worry about straight out asking if the company is a place you can trust, I think that implies doubt and could turn someone off from hiring you. The question about learning I do think are good, and can be something to create a dialogue in the interview which is always helpful. Especially as a young adult entering the work field not only does it show you are wanting to learn but are hoping to grow with in the company. I think that as I continue to do more interviews I will have a better way to respond when it is my turn to ask questions, but so far I have not done well with it, and I often find it hard to relate to the general interview advice on the internet.
This article illuminates the part of job interviews that I really wanted to know about. I struggle with how much I can probe about what an actual working day looks like, how much opportunities one can get from the company (whether it be promotion opportunities or self-development opportunities), whether there would be official training for the job and etc. What the article suggests almost sounds like changing the position and you would be interviewing the interviewers. And this is also another thing that did not dawn on me until recently that a job interview is a chance for the employer to get to know the prospective employee but also for the prospective employee to test the employer. In my mind the employers till holds the advantageous position and job interviews are not equal playing field for both parties. However, when phrased right, these questions can potentially humanize the interviewers so that more frank conversation can take place.
Trying to figure out what you want to do when you have multiple offers on the table can be hard and most times seem daunting. As we who were in PTM during the three months that Drew fought with trying to decide upon where to work and in what capacity at several companies that he had offers from. This article brings up three major points to consider of the many that should be in my mind. Two of the biggest for me were can you grow and can you trust. It is without these two that I find it hard to be anywhere that would not meet these things. If you're unable to trust you then are unable to feel safe and relaxed. If you are to be productive, you must feel safe. Also if you are not enabled to grow beyond what you were when you started, it makes it feel pointless like your stuck in a rut and thus stunting your future.
Apply and interviewing for jobs are extremely hard and there’s never a right way to do it. While there are certainly ways to do wrong things an interview, its more subjective I would say in doing a good job. For me the hardest part of an interview is when they ask you to ask them questions. I never know if the questions I’m asking are good questions and im never sure if I have asked enough or too little. The great part of this article is that they gave really good questions to ask. My favorite question the presented was “can you grow” I think this is very important in theatre as every new show I’ll be a challenge and for me I love to learn and grow on every show. I might not be as enthused about taking a job if it’s something I have already done and there’s nothing that can make me grow. Another question I enjoyed was the ‘can you trust” if you cannot trust the people you are making theatre with it will not turn out as well.
This is a really helpful article, since I know that I personally always struggle to think of questions to ask at the end of an interview. These are three very major important categories to consider when looking at multiple jobs. In theatrical companies, it's a little bit easier since we typically either know a lot about the theatre and how it works already, or we know someone that is working there or has worked there in the past and can give actual insight into the organization. However, these are still important things to think about personally, even if they aren't actually asked to the interviewer. Right now especially, when I'm trying to begin thinking about what I want to do in the long run, these are questions that I need to ask myself about what I want in life and where I want to go. It's important to consider how each job, while it might not be the job of a lifetime, contributes to your personal and professional growth.
We had a great discussion over this topic in Molly's Production Personnel class. It hard to ask questions like the meta ones posed in this article like: can i trust, can i grow, etc. From the employers end its easier because they can ask interviewees hypotheticals like "what is a time that you solved a problem?" whereas I feel like if as an interviewee you were to ask an employer a hypothetical, it would seem a bit odd. I think this gives us a challenge as interviewees to ask those long-term questions of a company by asking small more logistical questions that can accumulate to the macro idea. I'd be curious about turn over rate, benefits, mission of company, all of which contribute to the aspects of trust and growth in a company. You can also see by just touring a facility of what kind of people work there and if they seem generally happy. I'm sure this would come later in the interview process but would be a great indicator.
I am thinking constantly about my future and how to negotiate what I want from jobs. The harder part of this conversation is that you have to understand what you want out of a job. Part of what I am struggling with is what is important to me and what I am willing to sacrifice. I think when asking questions at a job interview I always ask what made the person interviewing what made them pick this job and what they like bout it now. I also like to ask when they think makes the company special or different. I like this questions because people like to talk about themselves and I also like ti because you find you what is important to the company and a little back story about the person interviewing you. I think Jeremy makes another good point that you have to see growth in whatever company you work at. It's one thing to love a job at 22 but at 25 if you haven't made any progress then the job isn't right for you.
Though general, I appreciate the sentiment behind this article. I do like how this article encourages people to ask questions of a future employer, rather that just the other way around. I am a firm believer that making sure a job is a right for for you, and not that you just fit the job, is an important part of the job search, and by doing so you are likely to stay in that job longer and produce better work. I especially appreciated the questions bout whether or not someone can grow within his or her job or even within the company. I think it is important to recognize that people are more than just cogs in a machine and need to be able to advance their career and themselves. If they cannot do that in one job, then they are likely to search else where in order to find these opportunities. I think the questions in this article are overall good baselines for what questions to ask a potential employer.
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