Questions to Ask the Interviewer (40 That Work)

Questions to ask the interviewer, grouped by who you are speaking to, with the ones that reveal the most about the job and the four you should never ask.

Questions to ask the interviewer are not a formality at the end of the call. They are a scored part of the interview at most companies, and they are your only chance to find out whether the job is actually good. Career guidance is consistent on the mechanics: prepare at least three questions with follow-ups, adapt them live to what you heard, and choose questions that show you understood the role rather than questions answered on the careers page. The strongest questions do two jobs at once. They give you real information about the work and they demonstrate how you think. The weakest ones ask about benefits, holiday policy, or how many other people are interviewing, all of which signal that you are evaluating the package rather than the problem.

TL;DR

Prepare at least three questions with follow-ups, and expect to use only two of them.
Ask different questions to the recruiter, the hiring manager, a peer, and a skip level. Their answers are only credible in their own lane.
The single highest value question is what the person in this role must accomplish in the first six months.
Never ask about paid time off, how many candidates are interviewing, or when your first review is, in a first round.
Take one note in front of them. It shows you asked the question for the answer, not for the credit.
If you are told there is no time for questions, ask one anyway, by email the same day.

Who should you ask what?

Asking a recruiter about technical architecture wastes your one question, and asking a future peer about compensation bands makes them uncomfortable. Match the question to the person.

Who	Ask them about	Do not ask them about
Recruiter	Process, timeline, team size, band, next steps	Day to day technical detail
Hiring manager	Success in the first six months, priorities, how they manage	Their own career history at length
Future peer	What a bad week looks like, how work actually gets assigned	Compensation, headcount politics
Skip level or executive	Where the team fits into the company’s next year	Anything a peer could answer
Panel or group	One question addressed to the whole room about tradeoffs	Individual scoring or feedback

Preparing four small sets rather than one general list also removes the awkward moment where you ask the same question twice in one loop. If you want to hear how your questions sound out loud before the day, five free timed questions for your role is a quick way to rehearse the whole close of the interview and not just your answers.

What are the best questions to ask the hiring manager?

The hiring manager is the person whose answers actually predict your experience. Spend your best questions here.

What does the person in this role need to accomplish in the first six months for you to consider the hire a success?
What are the most important problems you are hoping this person solves?
What does the first 30, 60 and 90 days look like?
How is performance measured in this role, and against what?
What is the skill this team is missing right now?
What has made previous people in this role struggle?
How do you prefer to give feedback, and how often?
What decisions would I be able to make on my own, and which would come to you?
What is currently on the roadmap that you are least confident about?
Is there anything in my background you would want me to expand on?

Question ten is the one most candidates skip and it is the most useful. It gives the interviewer permission to raise a reservation while you are still in the room to answer it, instead of raising it in the debrief when you are not.

What should you ask a future teammate?

Peers give you the truth the manager cannot. They are also the people who will tell you what the job is like on a bad week, if you ask in a way that makes honesty easy.

What does a bad week look like here?
How does work actually get assigned day to day?
What surprised you in your first three months?
What is the most frustrating part of the process here?
Who do you go to when you are stuck?
How much of your week is meetings?
What has changed on this team in the last year?
Would you take this job again?

Phrasing matters. “What does a bad week look like” gets a real answer. “Is there anything negative about working here” gets a defensive one. Frame the question so the honest answer is the easy one.

What should you ask about the company and the team?

These are the questions that show you did your reading. Use them sparingly, because a candidate who only asks strategy questions in a first round can read as more interested in the company than the job.

Who do you see as your biggest competitor, and why?
What changed in the strategy in the last twelve months?
How does this team’s work show up in the company’s goals?
What is the team’s headcount plan for the next year?
How are decisions made when two teams disagree?
What does the company do badly that it is actively trying to fix?
How would you describe the culture in a way that is not on the careers page?

If you are not yet clear on why you want this specific company, that is a gap in your own preparation and it will show. The why do you want to work here answer guide is the fastest way to fix it, because the research that produces a good answer also produces good questions.

What are the best questions to ask about growth and process?

What is the typical career path from this role?
How is training handled for someone new to this stack or domain?
What does the promotion process look like, and how often does it run?
How is onboarding structured for the first two weeks?
Are there internal opportunities to work across teams?
What are the next steps in the process, and when should I expect to hear?
Is there anyone else on the team it would be useful for me to speak to?

Question 31 belongs to the recruiter and should always be asked. It is not a soft question. It sets the timeline you can reference politely if you go quiet for two weeks.

What does asking well actually look like?

Worked example 1: the hiring manager close

You: “Before we finish, what would the person in this role need to have accomplished in six months for you to look back and say this hire clearly worked?”

Manager: “Honestly, getting the reporting pipeline stable. It breaks most weeks and my team spends about a day a week firefighting it instead of building.”

You, taking a note: “That is useful. When it breaks, is it usually the same failure, or different ones each time?”

Manager: “Same two or three, mostly upstream schema changes we do not get told about.”

You: “Then can I ask a follow-up. Would that fix be mine to own, or would I be negotiating it with the upstream team?”

Manager: “You would be negotiating it. That is the harder half.”

Why this works: the opening question gets a concrete problem rather than a description of the role. The two follow-ups convert one answer into real information about scope and about how much authority you would actually have. And the candidate now knows exactly what to write in the follow-up email, because the manager has named their own pain.

Worked example 2: the peer interview

You: “What does a bad week on this team look like?”

Peer: “Probably end of quarter. Two or three urgent requests land at once and nobody has really said which one wins.”

You: “How does that get resolved? Does someone call it, or does it work itself out?”

Peer: “Usually our manager calls it, but sometimes not for a couple of days, and we all just sort of guess in the meantime.”

You: “That is helpful, thank you. Last one: when you joined, what did you wish somebody had told you in week one?”

Peer: “That you are allowed to say no to the ad hoc requests. I said yes to everything for two months.”

Why this works: the candidate asks about a bad week rather than about culture, which produces a specific answer instead of a slogan. The follow-up probes how decisions are made under pressure, which is the thing you cannot learn from the job description. The final question is disarming and almost always produces the single most useful sentence of the interview.

What should you never ask?

Some questions cost you more than the information is worth in a first round. Career advice from Indeed lists several to avoid, including the paid time off policy, how many other people are interviewing, whether references will be contacted, and when your first performance review will be.

The pattern behind all four is the same. Each of them asks about what you get rather than what the job is, before the company has decided it wants you. None of these are wrong questions in themselves. They are wrong questions at that moment. Compensation, benefits, holiday, and flexibility are all fair and necessary, and the right time to raise them is with the recruiter, or at offer stage, when you have leverage and the answer changes your decision.

Two more to avoid: anything answered in the first paragraph of the careers page, and “so what does your company do?”. Both say you did not prepare. If you are short on time before the interview, the how to prepare for an interview in 24 hours guide covers the minimum research that keeps you out of that hole.

How many questions should you actually ask?

Prepare more than you will use. Ask fewer than you prepared.

Interview type	Prepare	Ask	Note
Recruiter screen, 30 minutes	4	2	Include next steps and timeline
Hiring manager, 45 to 60 minutes	6	3	Lead with the six month question
Peer or panel round	5	2 to 3	One per person if it is a panel
Final or executive round	5	2	Make at least one about the next year
One way video, no live interviewer	0	0	Send them by email instead

A one way recorded interview has no interviewer to ask, which is one of the reasons the format feels flat. The one way video interview tips guide covers how to handle that, and the fix is a short email afterwards with two questions in it.

Second and final rounds need a different set from the first, because repeating a first round question suggests you did not listen the first time. The second interview questions guide covers what changes at that stage.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many questions should I ask at the end of an interview?

Two or three in a typical 45 minute interview. Prepare at least three with follow-ups so you have a spare when one gets answered during the conversation, and stop when you sense the interviewer is watching the clock.

What if all my questions were already answered during the interview?

Say so, and ask a follow-up on something they said instead. “You mentioned earlier that the team is restructuring. How would that change this role in the first year?” This is stronger than a prepared question, because it proves you were listening.

Should I ask about salary in the first interview?

Ask the recruiter, not the hiring manager, and ask about the band rather than your number. Recruiters expect it and often raise it first. Bringing compensation up with a future manager or peer in an early round is the version that costs you.

Is it acceptable to read my questions from notes?

Yes. Having notes reads as preparation, not weakness, on video and in person. What reads badly is reading a question that the interviewer already answered ten minutes earlier, which is what happens when you use the list without listening.

What should I ask when the interviewer is very senior?

Ask something only they can answer: where the team fits into the company’s next year, what would make them shut this initiative down, what they think the company is getting wrong. Do not spend a chief executive’s time on a question a peer could have answered.

What if I am told there is no time for questions?

Ask one anyway. “I know we are at time, so just one: what would success look like in six months?” If that is not possible, send two questions by email the same day. It restarts the conversation and gives you a legitimate reason to be in their inbox.