Questions to ask at an interview: 30 examples

Most interview preparation stops at the answers. What you ask back is what separates a strong interview from a forgettable one.

The strongest questions to ask at an interview cover scope, risk, expectations and process. Ask what success looks like in the first six months, why the role is open, what the team’s biggest challenge is, how performance gets measured, and what happens next. Those five take under five minutes and tell you most of what you need.

• What does a successful first six months look like in this role?
• Why is the role open, and what happened with the person who held it?
• What’s the biggest challenge facing this team right now?
• How will my performance be measured in the first year?
• What are the next steps, and when do you expect to decide?

The full 30, grouped by topic, follow below.

Your questions show the interviewer how you think. They prove you’ve researched the organisation, understood the role, and already pictured your first six months in it. They also give you the information you need to judge whether the job is right for you, which matters more than most people admit at the time.

What your questions signal to an interviewer:

• Preparation. You’ve read beyond the job advert.
• Judgement. You can tell a material question from a trivial one.
• Seniority. You’re thinking about outcomes, not tasks.

Treat the interview as a two-way conversation. The employer is assessing your fit. You’re assessing theirs.

Interviews are scarce and most people arrive at them underprepared. Three Careerminds research findings set the context.

Finding	Figure	Campaign
Resumes leading to a new job, median 64 days to hire	15.8%	The resume skills that get jobseekers hired, Jul 2026
Long-tenured workers with a resume significantly out of date or non-existent	46.5%	Why long-tenured workers are the hardest to transition, Apr 2026
Long-tenured workers with a mostly or completely inactive professional network	53.3%	Why long-tenured workers are the hardest to transition, Apr 2026

Careerminds analysed 9,700 resumes with observable hiring outcomes and found that just 15.8% of resumes, roughly one in six, led to a new job, with a median time to hire of 64 days. The dataset covers resumes rather than CVs, drawn from Careerminds and its career-services brands. Source: The resume skills that get jobseekers hired, Careerminds, July 2026.

The preparation gap is sharpest among people who’ve been in one job a long time. Careerminds found that 46.5% of long-tenured workers had a resume that was significantly out of date or did not exist at all, and 53.3% had a mostly or completely inactive professional network when their layoff hit. Source: Why long-tenured workers are the hardest to transition, Careerminds, April 2026.

If you haven’t interviewed in five years, your questions are the part of the process that ages fastest. Rehearsed answers carry over. Knowing what to ask about hybrid working, AI adoption or restructuring does not.

Ask about the role when you want to test whether the job description matches the day job. These questions surface scope, ownership and workload before you accept anything.

1. What does a successful first six months look like in this role?
2. Which parts of this role take up the most time day to day?
3. Why is the role open, and what happened with the person who held it?
4. What’s the biggest challenge facing this team right now?
5. How has this role changed in the past two years?
6. Which decisions would I own, and which would I escalate?

Question three does the most work. An honest answer tells you whether the role is a growth hire, a backfill after a resignation, or a seat that keeps emptying.

Ask about the team when you want to understand who you’ll work with and how they operate. Your manager shapes your experience of a job more than the brand on the door does.

7. How would you describe your management style?
8. How does the team handle disagreement about priorities?
9. Who would I work with most closely outside this team?
10. How often does the team meet, and what gets covered?
11. What does this team do well that you’d want me to protect?

Ask about culture when you want evidence rather than adjectives. Push for examples, because every organisation describes itself as collaborative and fast-moving.

12. How do people here move into more senior roles?
13. What development budget sits behind this role?
14. How does the organisation support internal moves between teams?
15. What’s changed about working here in the past year?
16. How do you recognise strong work outside of pay rises?
17. What happens to people here when teams restructure?

Question seventeen is worth asking even in a growing business. The answer tells you how the employer treats people on the way out, which is a reliable signal of how it treats them on the way in. Employers that fund outplacement services tend to say so, and our piece on why exit interviews keep mentioning “no growth” covers what employees say once they’re leaving.

Ask about performance and pay when you want clarity on measurement and money. Waiting until the offer stage costs you bargaining room and time.

18. How will my performance be measured in the first year?
19. When do performance and pay reviews take place?
20. What does the salary band look like for this level?
21. What does underperformance look like here, and how do you handle it?
22. How does hybrid or flexible working operate in practice?
23. What would make you say I’d exceeded expectations?

Practice on pay disclosure varies widely between UK employers. Our guide to pay transparency sets out where the rules sit, and how to ask for a pay rise covers the conversation once you’re in post.

Ask process questions at the end of an interview, once the substance is covered. These clarify timelines and give you a final chance to address doubts.

24. What are the next steps, and when do you expect to decide?
25. Is there anything in my background you’d like me to expand on?
26. Do you have any hesitations about my fit for this role?
27. How many people are you speaking to at this stage?
28. Who else would I meet if I progress?
29. Who makes the final decision on this hire?
30. How long has the hiring process been running so far?

Question twenty-six is uncomfortable and worth it. It’s the only question that lets you answer an objection the interviewer would otherwise take into the debrief unchallenged.

Avoid questions with answers you could have found in ten minutes of research, and avoid anything that reads as an exit plan before you’ve started.

• Anything answered on the careers page, the annual report or the job advert
• “What does the company do?”
• “How quickly can I be promoted?” as an opener rather than a follow-up
• Holiday, sick pay and notice periods at first interview, unless the interviewer raises them
• Questions about other applicants by name or detail
• Anything you’ve already asked earlier in the same conversation

Save benefits and contractual detail for the offer stage or the recruiter. At first interview they compete for airtime with questions that actually influence the decision.

Careerminds coaches recommend preparing eight to ten questions and expecting to ask three or four. Most interviewers leave time at the end, though how much varies, and a good answer often prompts a follow-up that eats the time you’d allocated to your next question.

Stage	Questions to prioritise	What you’re testing
First interview	Role, team, challenges	Whether the job matches the advert
Second interview	Culture, progression, performance	Whether you’d stay and grow
Final stage	Pay, measurement, next steps	Whether the offer works

Preparing more than you need also protects you when the interviewer answers two of your questions unprompted during the conversation.

Build your questions from the job description, the organisation’s recent news and the interviewer’s own background. Write them down and take the list in with you.

1. Read the job description and mark anything vague. Turn each vague line into a question.
2. Check the organisation’s recent announcements, results or restructures. Ask how they affect the team you’d join.
3. Look up each interviewer. Ask the hiring manager about the work and the senior stakeholder about direction.
4. Write your questions in order of importance, because you’ll get through fewer than you plan.
5. Cross off any question that gets answered during the interview, and say so when you ask the next one.

Taking notes into an interview looks prepared. Reading every question verbatim off the page does the opposite, so keep them short enough to glance at.

If you’re weighing up where to focus, our breakdown of the most in demand skills in 2026 is a useful place to start, and what an AI career coach does and what it doesn’t sets out where automated tools help and where they fall short.

What are good questions to ask an interviewer?

Good questions are specific to the role and impossible to answer from the job advert. Ask what success looks like in the first six months, why the role is open, what the biggest challenge facing the team is, and how people progress into more senior positions.

What are the five best questions to ask at an interview?

Ask what a successful first six months looks like, why the role is open, what the team’s biggest challenge is right now, how performance gets measured, and what the next steps are. Those five cover scope, risk, expectations and process in under five minutes.

Should I ask about salary at an interview?

Ask about the salary band at second interview or with the recruiter, not in the opening minutes of a first interview. Most UK employers expect the question, and asking about the band rather than a specific figure keeps the conversation factual.

What should I ask if the interviewer has already answered everything?

Say what you’d planned to ask and confirm it’s been covered, then move to a process question about next steps or a direct question about any hesitations they have. Saying you have no questions at all reads as a lack of interest.

How you handle an exit shapes how quickly people land afterwards. Careerminds research found that 39% of employees who saw their employer’s redundancy communications as fair found a new role within one month. Source: How redundancy communications affect employee trust and re-employment, Careerminds, October 2025.

Careerminds coaches work one to one with participants on interview preparation, CV positioning and search strategy, with an 11.5 weeks average time to land.

Talk to our UK team about outplacement and career transition support for your organisation.