The short answer
Prepare five or six, expect half to be answered before you get there, and match them to who is in front of you. The best questions are specific to the role and produce an answer you could not have found online. Listening to how they answer is the part that tells you whether to accept.
What matters most
- Prepare five or six, since several will be answered during the conversation.
- Match the question to the person: recruiters, hiring managers, peers and executives know different things.
- The best questions are specific and produce answers you could not have looked up.
- How they answer matters as much as what they say — vagueness is data.
The two jobs your questions are doing
Questions at the end of an interview serve two ends that occasionally pull against each other. The first is evidential: a specific, well-aimed question demonstrates preparation and judgement in a way that no answer to "why do you want this job?" can. The second is diligence: you are being asked to commit years of your working life on the basis of one hour, and this is when you gather the information to decide.
The evidential purpose dominates in early rounds and with people who have a say in hiring you. The diligence purpose dominates in later rounds, with peers, and once an offer looks likely. Getting the order wrong — leading with a diligence question about workload in a first-round screen — is what makes an otherwise reasonable question land badly.
Match the question to the person
| Who you are speaking to | They genuinely know | Do not ask them |
|---|---|---|
| Recruiter or coordinator | The process, the timeline, the band, why the role is open, what the hiring manager is weighting | Detailed questions about the day-to-day work or the technical stack |
| Hiring manager | What success looks like, how they manage, what the team is bad at, what the first project would be | Anything answered on the careers page |
| Future peer | What the work is actually like, how decisions get made, whether the tools work, what they would change | Anything that puts them in the position of critiquing their manager on the record |
| Skip-level or executive | Where the function is going, how it is funded, how this team fits the strategy | Detailed operational questions they will not know the answer to |
| Technical assessor | The stack, the standards, the amount of legacy, how much of the week is actually spent building | Broad culture questions |
| HR at final stage | Benefits, review cycles, progression frameworks, policy on flexible working | Questions that reopen the assessment |
Questions that are worth the airtime
About the role itself
- What would you want the person in this role to have achieved by the end of their first six months?
- What is the hardest part of this job that would not be obvious from the posting?
- What is the split between the recurring work and the project work in a normal week?
- Why is this role open — is it new, a replacement, or a restructure?
- What has stopped previous attempts at this from working?
- Which part of the job description is the part you would actually protect if the role had to shrink?
About the team and how it works
- How does this team make a decision when two people disagree and both are senior?
- Who would I work with most closely outside this team, and what do they need from this role?
- How is work prioritised when more comes in than the team can absorb?
- What does the team do well enough that you would not want a new person changing it?
- How long has the team been together, and what has changed most in the last year?
About the manager, asked of the manager
- How do you prefer to stay across your team's work — regular one-to-ones, written updates, something else?
- What does someone need to do to earn autonomy from you?
- How would I know if you were unhappy with something before it became a formal conversation?
- What is something you have changed about how you manage in the last couple of years?
About the organisation
- What is the thing about working here that people are surprised by once they join?
- How is this function funded, and how secure is that funding over the next couple of years?
- What is the company betting on that it was not betting on two years ago?
Questions that quietly cost you
Not every question is free. A handful of common ones do measurable damage, mostly by signalling that you have not prepared or that your attention is somewhere other than the work.
"So what does the company do, exactly?"
"You describe yourselves as moving from services into a product model — how far through that is the business in practice, and what does that mean for this team?"
"How quickly could I be promoted?"
"What does progression look like from this role, and what tends to distinguish the people who move up quickly here?"
"What is the holiday allowance and can I work from home?"
(Save it, or ask the recruiter.) "What does a normal week look like in terms of where the team works?"
Also avoid: anything the interviewer has already answered, which shows you were rehearsing rather than listening; questions about your own performance in the interview, which put a polite person in an awkward position; and the number of questions that turns the last five minutes into a second interview conducted by you. Two or three well-placed questions beat six.
Listening to the answer
The information is not only in what they say. A hiring manager who cannot describe what success looks like in six months either has not thought about the role or does not have the authority to define it, and both are worth knowing. A team of three that all answer "how do you handle disagreement?" with a slightly different story is healthier than one that answers with a slogan. Long hesitations on questions about turnover, and answers that describe intentions rather than practice — "we are trying to get better at that" — are honest and useful signals rather than reasons to walk away, but they should go into your notes.
Where the answers genuinely matter is at offer stage, when you are comparing options and half of the comparison is not in the salary. Our job offer comparison tool gives you somewhere to line those factors up against each other, and the interview red flags guide covers the answers that should genuinely worry you.
The last thing to ask
Close with the process, every time, at every stage: what the next step is and when you should expect to hear. It is the one question that is never wasted, it gives you a legitimate date to follow up on, and it prevents the fortnight of silence in which most candidates talk themselves out of a job they were still in the running for.
If you want to leave one further impression, a closing line that invites them to raise a doubt is unusually effective: "is there anything about my background that gives you pause, that I could speak to now?" It is a small risk, and it occasionally hands you the chance to address the exact objection that would otherwise have gone unanswered in a scoring meeting you are not in the room for.
Then follow it up in writing. Our guide to the thank-you note covers what to include, and there is a template in the letters library if you would rather start from a structure.
Questions people actually ask
How many questions should I ask at the end of an interview?
Prepare five or six and ask two or three. Several of yours will be answered in the conversation, and a candidate who works through a full list turns the closing minutes into an interrogation.
Is it acceptable to ask about salary in the interview?
With a recruiter, yes, and early — it saves everyone time. With a hiring manager in a first round, it is better to wait unless they raise it. Handling the question when they raise it is covered in our guide on salary questions in an interview.
What should I ask a future colleague rather than the manager?
What the work is genuinely like day to day, how decisions get made in practice, what they would change, and what surprised them when they joined. Peers answer these more candidly than managers can.
Can I bring written questions into the interview?
Yes. A notepad with a few questions on it reads as preparation, not as a crutch, and taking notes on the answers is entirely normal. Reading a long list mechanically is the only version that hurts.
What if all my questions get answered during the interview?
Say so briefly and ask a new one. Good fallbacks are what success looks like in six months, what the hardest part of the job is, and what the next step in the process will be.
Should I ask why the previous person left?
Ask why the role is open, which is the same question phrased so nobody has to discuss an individual. The answer — growth, promotion, replacement, or a role that has turned over repeatedly — is genuinely informative.
