"It's been great speaking with you today.
Do you have any questions for me?" Hmm,
none that I can think of right now. Don't do this in an interview.
You need to be interviewing them just as much as they are interviewing you.
Hello and welcome back to my channel,
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I release a new video each Tuesday. If you are someone who's firmly in camp,
'I don't ask questions at the end of the interview.'.
let me just tell you one thing.
If you fail to ask questions at the end of the job interview,
you are in a one sided interview.
The thing that so many people don't get about a job interview,
is that it is actually by directional.
You are interviewing them just as much as they are interviewing you.
If you don't do your job as an interviewer to ask questions,
to learn more about the role, express your interest,
and figure out if this really is the role for you to be successful in,
you might end up in the wrong job, at the wrong company.
And be really, really unhappy. The other thing is,
if you're not asking any questions at the end of your job interview,
it does sadly increase your chance of giving off that air of desperation,
where you don't really care what job you have. You just need any job.
That's not the presence that you want to bring in, or end, a job interview with.
Which is why asking questions at the end of your job interview is crucial. Now,
if you've been around for a while,
you probably know that I don't take the traditional approach,
so I am going to give you a lot of sample questions that you can actually ask
today.
But what I want to cover in today's video is the five different categories of
questions that you should be bringing into your job interview.
And make sure to stay all the way to the end,
because I'm going to give you the magic number of questions that
you need to ask each person that you are actually interviewing with.
Show me you're ready to craft killer
questions to ask at the end of your interview by clicking that like button.
And let's get right into it. The best question to ask in an interview,
and the first type that I want to dive into is success questions.
And this question isn't only strategic in terms of getting you the information
that you need,
such as knowing that they actually have definitions of success for the role.
Don't assume that everyone does.
It's also opening up a conversation about what success actually looks like.
And when you're asking your future manager about the success metrics,
and getting them to envision you in the role. Well,
they're actually envisioning you in the role,
which is one of the biggest hurdles that you're actually trying to breach in a
job interview.
The more that they can actually see you performing the duties and succeeding in
that role,
the more likely they are going to be to actually give you the job offer.
You know, should you choose to accept.
Ideally, this actually opens up a conversation,
and whenever they actually say you can have a discussion around.
And you can actually mirror the success metrics with your experience,
and with the skills that you're bringing to the table.
This is really going to crystallize their understanding and expectation
of you being the person who is going to be the most successful in this role.
And I know that now you're like, Jennifer, I need to ask these questions.
Give me some of them. Well, these ones are actually really simple.
I want you to put these into your own words,
because this needs to feel natural when you ask it, but asking things like:
what does success look like in this role?
Or what are the key performance indicators in this role
is going to open up the conversation about what success actually looks like.
What would I need to focus on in my first 90 days to make sure that.
I'm the best person on your team?
One thing I do want you to do is to focus more on the general definitions
of success versus the more tactical thing, which is going to be the next step.
So stay tuned for that one.
But you don't want to be asking so much about when the performance reviews
are conducted and things like that.
You just actually want to know if they actually have a vision of success
and how you can actually show them that you are the person.
One of the ways that I have heard this asked, that actually depersonalizes it,
and I don't actually recommend this,
is to ask what are the skills or qualities of the top person on your team.
The thing is if you ask it like that, they're thinking about their team member,
and not thinking about you possessing those skills and qualities.
So what I really want you to do is to avoid depersonalization.
You want them to be envisioning you as the most successful team member in this
role.
I've participated in so many hiring conversations where I've heard people say,
I just don't see them being successful in this role.
They might like that candidate, that candidate might be incredible,
but if they can't see them being successful,
if that vision isn't crystal clear in their minds,
it's going to be hard for them to make that hurdle,
to actually choose them as a successful candidate and extend the job offer to
them. You want to avoid that. At the end of the day,
what you're trying to accomplish with the success question is an
understanding for yourself, but as well to help to create the vision for them.
So that there isn't that gap when they're making the decision surrounding
hiring.
And that leads me directly into this second category of questions to ask at the
end of the interview, and that is tactical. Now,
this shouldn't be overly tactical asking things like when your lunch break
is and how much vacation you get, because let's face it,
you're not there yet in the interview process.
The tactical questions that you should have should all actually be focused
on the job description itself.
So this is where you're actually going to dig into the questions
that you have about actually performing the role.
Some of the tactical questions that you might bring up
at the end of the interview might be questions like,
what level of collaboration will I have with the product team?
What does a typical day in this role look like?
And even questions like what kind of ongoing training and support
does the company provide to make sure that everyone stays on top of their game?
And I know that there are probably tens of thousands of other questions
which are entirely customized to the role that you were actually interviewing
for, and the actual questions that you have.
Taking time to actually identify these tactical questions
is going to have a really big payoff for you. Again,
it is going to help you fill the gaps so that you were walking into,
should you accept the eventual job offer,
that you're going to get fully informed about what you're actually walking into.
But it's also going to give you the opportunity to demonstrate
to them how interested you are in the role,
and to also demonstrate how well prepared you are for the interview,
and that you did in fact do a lot of preparation and
you have been very thoughtful in your job search. On that note,
there are a lot of tactical questions that I know people ask
frequently at the end of a job interview and they're actually questions
that you need to avoid like a flaming bag of dog poop,
and that's actually going to be the topic of my next video.
So if you haven't already clicked the subscription button,
because I know you're not going to want to miss it.
Because these are definitely ditches you do not want to fall into.
Now overlapping and I actually, as I was coming up
with some sample questions as I was recording this video,
this one actually has a lot of overlap with the third category
of questions that you'll ask at the end of a job interview,
and that is questions surrounding leadership.
Remember you're interviewing them just as much as they're interviewing you,
so you need to get to know the type of leader that you might potentially go to
work for. And this question isn't only reserved for your hiring manager.
If you were interviewing with team members,
you should absolutely be asking about leadership to know exactly what you're
walking into.
This is really important to your due diligence in selecting your next manager.
To find someone that is going to support you and help you grow,
as opposed to finding yourself working for a horribly toxic manager who
basically makes your life miserable.
There's all sorts of leadership questions that you could be asking to
find out what type of leader or manager you are potentially about to go to work
for.
Now, one of the questions that I love asking, it's just simply asking,
what is your leadership style?
Not everyone has a really well thought out answer.
And don't judge them negatively if they don't.
But understanding the type of approach that that manager actually takes to
leadership, it's going to help you understand if that actually aligns
with how you actually like to work with your manager.
You can also ask questions like,
what role do you like to play in your team's ongoing professional growth?
This is going to give you an indicator of how invested they are in their team's
success.
I think that this category of question to ask at the end of the job interview
is actually particularly important when you are meeting
with people who might end up being your teammates,
getting a feel of how they actually feel about their manager,
their sentiment towards them,
and the relationship that they have is something that is going to
inform what potential relationship that you might actually have with that
manager. Asking a simple question like,
tell me a little bit about your working relationship with [insert hiring m
anager's name]. is going to actually inform you about what their experience is.
Is everyone going to be completely honest?
And if they're working for a total d-bag, are they going to tell you? No.
Probably not. But watch for the indicators,
and you can actually get a gut feel from how people actually add sort of this
question. You can also ask about general leadership at the company,
not just the hiring manager,
because the thing is that the top leaders in a company really
influence leadership across all levels of an organization.
This is also going to be a data point that informs you about what your
experience might be. This question, just in case you were curious,
doesn't do anything to convince them to hire you or that you're the right person
for the role unless you are interviewing for a leadership position.
This category of job interview question is entirely selfish.
It is designed to inform you on making the right decision
when you actually receive that job offer,
in terms of whether you want to accept or whether you want to find a better fit.
But you need to consider more than leadership for that.
And that brings me directly into my next category of job interview questions to
ask,
and that is about the company culture.
I know when I just said company culture that a lot of you just thought
about woo-woo values, with the mission statement stapled to the wall,
but no one ever looks at, and no one cares about,
and they certainly do not live by.
But that's not actually quite what I'm asking.
Only about 10% of companies have a mission and values
that they have actually cultivated intentionally and truly live by.
For 90% of companies, you want to get a general feel by asking other
questions aside from what's your company mission. Which by the way,
you should probably have found in your interview research online.
And you ask this question in a job interview to your potential employer.
You want to make sure that it's purposeful,
that you actually know what you're looking for in your next company.
If you don't know what that is and you haven't already checked out my ideal
workplace,
I definitely recommend you check it out after this one.
I'll drop the link in the description bar so you can check it out once we're
done here. This might be something that is really easy to ask around
and get an understanding of for those companies that actually
have it defined and are actually living by it,
but for the vast majority of companies.
This is going to take a couple of different question angles
in order for you to get an understanding.
One of the questions that you can actually ask is how do you
actually describe the culture here?
What words do you use to describe your colleagues?
Now hopefully they are going to describe their company and
their coworkers in terms of positive attributes and if not warning sign,
but also asking things like what's something that's
consistently important across all teams or even asking generically
what's it like working here can be things that really actually inform you.
One thing that I do want to just highlight with this category and with the
leadership category,
is that they really are tip of the iceberg questions.
You really want to be observant in terms of how people interact,
how they are with each other. Especially if you're in a group interview.
If you're at an onsite interview, what's the vibe in the office?
What's the cleanliness? These are all going to be great indicators,
not just for leadership, but also in terms of the actual company culture. Now,
once you've asked those categories of questions,
you were going to move into the last category,
and this is a question that you are going to ask last.
And you must ask those question category at the end of every interview,
and that is asking about next steps.
This is one that I see way too many people accidentally skip over it,
and this one is really straightforward.
I can give you a very simple template.
You can put it in your own words if you would like to,
and depending on what phase of the interview you're in, y.
ou're going to ask one of two questions or you might actually be asking both of
them. First of all,
you want to know what the next step is at the end of the interview,
ask the question, what are the next steps? Pretty straightforward,
right? If you're already in the process or they've already explained to you what
the hiring process looks like, what you can ask in status.
When can I expect to hear about the next step?
This is going to give you the timeline so that you're not sitting desperately
looking at your phone hoping for a text message or an email to figure ouy
if you've made it to the next round of interviews or if you've gotten that
offer.
It's going to give you the timeline of the decision so that you're not sitting
in suspense.
Because believe it or not,
some companies don't actually follow up with candidates all of the time.
In addition to having the timeline, which is really going to be helpful for you,
it gives you your next action to take because if you haven't heard back,
it also opens up the door for you to follow up with them. And finally,
I want to add in two bonus tips for you.
Now that you know the categories of questions that you do need to ask about.
One of the things that I find trips people up the most is,
how many questions do they need to ask?
Like do they need 10 questions under each category?
How long are they going to be there for?
What I actually recommend as a benchmark for you is to have three questions
ready for each person that you interview with as much as possible.
You want these questions to be unique from each other because oftentimes,
especially when you have more than one interviewer that is going to be meeting
with you,
they actually meet and debrief and discussed what you actually discussed in your
job interview, including the questions that you ask at the end of the interview.
And that's why I actually like having the category approach.
So that you can get different ideas,
and you know what you should be asking about.
But you can even ask it in different ways to the different people that you were
meeting with. This also applies for each time that you interview,
so even if you're meeting with
a hiring manager three times before you got to the job offer,
you should have three different questions each time that you actually meet with
them. Now, because I know that sometimes, especially in a job interview,
when nerves come into play, things just fly out of your head,
so I do recommend actually writing them down. You know,
be old school and bring a notebook and put your questions in.
Again, this is a signal to them that you are very interested in the role,
and you've gone so far as to actually prepare questions in advance.
This is going to count well for you as a candidate,
and even better when you ask really good questions.
And that actually leaves me with a question for you.
Do you have a question that you frequently ask at the end of the interview?
Let me know in the comments down below.
Now that you know how to effectively end the interview with the right questions
to ask. At the end of the interview,
I want to make sure that you're prepared to slay the beginning of the interview
when they ask you the question you know you're going to get,
tell me about yourself.
I have a video that is going to give you the exact formula that
you need to answer to engage and captivate them.
You can check it out right here.
Thank you as always so much for watching this video. If it was helpful,
make sure you can give it a thumbs up. I'll see you in the next one.
Bye for now.
{bloopers}