Interview the Job Before It Interviews You
I’ve hired people and I’ve been hired, and the pattern on both sides is the same. The candidate spends weeks preparing to be evaluated and about four minutes evaluating. Then they take the offer, and six months later they discover things about the place that a single good question would have surfaced in the first meeting. I did it myself, twice, before I learned to turn the chair around.
You’re making a bigger decision than they are
If they hire wrong, they lose a few months and some money. If you choose wrong, you lose a year or three of your working life, often your health, sometimes your confidence. The stakes are not symmetrical, and yet the interview is run as if only one party is at risk. Walk in knowing you’re the one with more to lose, and the questions come naturally.
Ask what happened to the last person
“Why is this role open?” Then listen carefully. Growth is a good answer. “The last person moved on” with no detail is worth a follow-up. A role that’s been open three times in two years is a role with a problem, and the problem is rarely the people who left.
Ask how they handle a bad week
“Tell me about the last time something went seriously wrong here. What happened?” Every workplace has bad weeks. What you’re learning is whether they blame, cover, or fix. The answer, and the manager’s comfort giving it, tells you what your own bad week will look like, and you’ll have one.
Ask to meet the people, not just the boss
A manager interviewing you is on best behaviour. The people who’d be your colleagues are less rehearsed. Ten minutes with one of them, ideally without the manager present, is worth more than an hour of formal interview. Ask them what a typical Tuesday looks like and what they’d change if they could. Watch their face more than their words.
Ask what success looks like in a year
If the answer is vague, nobody has thought about the role properly, and you’ll be the one who finds that out the hard way. If it’s specific, you’ve learned what you’ll be measured on, and you can decide whether those are things you’d be proud to be good at.
Ask about the hours, directly
“When do people usually leave? When does the last email of the day typically go out?” Everyone claims balance. The specific answer, and any hesitation before it, tells you the real culture. I once watched a hiring manager glance at his watch before saying “oh, we’re very flexible.” It was seven in the evening.
Watch how they treat you as a candidate
Late to the interview, slow to reply, vague about the offer, pressure to decide fast. This is them at their most careful. It does not improve after you sign.
Then decide like a buyer
Go home, write the paragraph: what you learned, what concerns you, what you’d need to be true to accept. Sleep on it. An offer is not a verdict on your worth; it’s a proposal, and proposals get evaluated. The people I’ve seen in good jobs for a long time all have one thing in common. They were choosing, and they knew it.
Next interview
Prepare your five questions as carefully as your answers. Ask them. Listen more than you perform. Then decide whether they passed.
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