Contrary to popular belief, an interview is a 2-way conversation. They’re assessing your skills and talents, but it’s also your responsibility to assess them. In this post, I’m going to go through some unique interview questions you can ask a potential employer. In particular, these questions are designed to:

1. Maximize your chances of being accepted into the company.
2. Maximize the information you’ll get so that you know whether the company’s a right fit for you, regardless of whether they accept you or not.

You want #1 above because having the optionality to join the company is strictly better than not.

And you want #2 because joining a company that isn’t a good fit is a waste of everyone’s time and creates a lot of unnecessary suffering.

Keep in mind the questions below are to ask your interviewers, and not the company itself. The questions for the latter is much easier to obtain and doesn’t affect whether or not they’ll hire you.

Things like benefits, etc. you can ask your recruiter and/or just refer to the contract you’ll sign. Anything benefits not to your desire can be negotiated with HR or the recruiter. Thus, there’s no need to waste precious interviewing time to ask about these things.

Unique Interview Questions To Ask A Prospective Employer: Helpful Questions

The following questions display helpfulness. You want to convey a sense of ‘I’d like to contribute to the company on day 1’ because most people want to hire in order to take some workload off their team.

As such, here are some questions you might consider asking.

“If I were to start in X weeks, what are the ideas or topics I should ramp up on so that I can start making an impact on day 1?”

This question shows that you’d like to be helpful to the team. When you ask this to an interviewer, it shows that you’re a team player and your intention is to be helpful. The second added benefit is actually a sales tactic, called ‘pacing’: you’re asking them to imagine you starting at the job. This’ll work on them subconsciously and give you a very slight edge, but sometimes that’s all you need.

“What’s a pain point in your work right now that would be very helpful if I came in an solved?”

This question is great because most teams want to hire new people in order to offload work (or some kind of pain point). They’re certainly not hiring people because they like wasting money. This question addresses this pain directly. Upon gathering intel with this question, you can also counter with a follow-up statement like: “I’d be great as addressing <pain point> because <refer to a past problem or experience that parallels the pain point>.”

Personally, I really hate the standard question that shows up on Google’s search for ‘unique interview questions to ask employer’:

“What does it take to be successful at this company?” or

“What are performance reviews like?”

These types of questions come off very selfish and just shows you want to be promoted as opposed to genuinely being helpful.

I mean obviously, you want to be promoted and get more money in a job. But consider the questions I’m proposing vs. the conventional answers you find on a search engine. They’re asking the same thing, but my questions are more tasteful.

On the same vein: who gives a shit about how their performance reviews look like or your promotion track? As I’ve mentioned before, the best way to get a promotion and more money is to switch jobs.

Questions To Ask At An Interview To See If The Employer Fits You

Here’s a couple of questions that’ll help you scan for red flags at the company.

“What’s your team’s turnover rate if you had to guess?”

Asking the team’s turnover is more helpful than the company’s turnover rate in general, because you mostly care about the culture in the team, and not at the company-level (which can be drastically different). A high turnover is obviously a red flag. And a low turnover is great.

“What’s the percentage of employees vs. contractors?”

The more contractors they have, the worse the team/company is, generally speaking. This is because contractors show no commitment to their workers on the employer’s part. Contractors are easily hired/fired, and are generally less skilled due to lower specialization (poor working environment). So: the more contractors a company has, the more it shows that the culture is focused on short-term vs. the long-term.

“What’s your philosophy on providing feedback and evaluating feedback for yourself?”

No hiring manager would flat out say “I’m always right; and everyone else is always wrong.” What you’re looking for is a well thought out answer here. If it’s something generic, it means they haven’t really thought about how to communicate with other people, and that’s a red flag.

Detecting one or more red flags should be grounds for not joining the company (unless it is an enormous pay jump that you’re willing to take the risk).

Surveying A Friend Who Hires People

I was wondering if my friend – also in the tech industry – had any insights on what are some good unique interview questions one could ask a prospective employer.

He said:

“I just wish they did research on me or the company. Or questions related to things they can’t just search online.”

Asking a question not being able to be found online is a little bit difficult. Though you can research on your interviewer via LinkedIn and ask pointed questions at your interviewer so it’s more personalized.

Being able to ask your interviewer personalized questions is a lot easier if you have a mutual LinkedIn friend. For instance, one of my old managers was a mutual friend of a job I’m interviewing in. And he gave me some details about him that I would’ve never gotten in LinkedIn or anywhere: he used to win math competitions. I’m genuinely interested in math competitions because they seem very difficult intellectually, and yet you have to face competition against other people that are just as smart as you are. And competing is one thing, winning is another. So this fascinated me.

Thus, here’s the questions I asked at the end of the technical portion of the interview (in the following order):

1. What are some things I could / learn prepare for the job if I were to start with their company?
2. How did you prepare for competitions and did you have a learning framework or routine that you did to ramp up for the math competitions?

The first question displays helpfulness. And the second question displays a genuine interest in both them as a person, and cohesively says “I want to know how to learn the question in #1 really well so that I can make an impact on day 1.”

But if you’ve no mutual friends on LinkedIn, that’s OK. Just ask personalized and specific questions based on what you can find on their resume then.

Lastly, keep in mind all of these questions you ask will give you a slight edge, but not an enormous one. You still have to perform beyond a threshold in your interview to be able to get the job, obviously.

Your Turn

Do you hire people? And are there any questions that you wish candidates would ask you, but didn’t?