May 03, 2023

Move Past the Surface Level Questions in Your Next Interview

At the end of last year, we saw a shift in candidates’ priorities, with economic factors like compensation, benefits, and future earning potential rising in importance. Thinking about what types of questions you should be asking in your interviews to address the factors that are most important to you will ensure that you are confident in having all of the information you need to make the right decision for what you are looking for in a career. Let’s look at potential questions for each of our top 5 factors.

 

Total Compensation, including benefits

• •  What are your favorite or most impactful benefits through COMPANY that you take advantage of?
• •   How does COMPANY typically approach adding new benefits for employees?
• •  What are some benefits that COMPANY provides outside of the traditional benefits like PTO and Health Insurance?
• •  (If this was not already provided pre-interview): I’d love to see a breakdown of your total compensation and benefits package. Would you be able to send me that?

 

Job Stability

• •  Can you walk me through the company’s top-line strategy for the next 3-5 years?
• •  What has your staff turnover rate been in the last 2 years?
• •  Can you tell me how COMPANY has been managing through the potential of an economic downturn?

 

Work-life balance

• •  Can you tell me what work-life balance looks like for you at COMPANY?
• •  What do typical working hours at COMPANY look like?
• •  What does COMPANY do to support work-life balance for their employees?
• •  How do you measure success in this role?

 

Future Earning Potential & Opportunities for Advancement

• •  How does COMPANY approach performance-based raises and promotions?
• •  What does internal career pathing look like at COMPANY?
• •  How do employees typically measure how they’re tracking toward milestones?
• •  What does performance management look like at COMPANY?

 

Remember that you should be interviewing the company as much as they are interviewing you. Do as much research as you can prior to your interviews so that you can really spend your live interview time asking the questions that matter and not the surface-level questions that you can find out from a simple Google search!