What questions should one ask to suss out the good team leads?
2. Ask "What do you like about working here?". If there's pushback or defensiveness, red flag.
3. Ask "If you were in my position, would you take this job?". Would they gladly take this job, or is there hesitation/defiance/pushback?
4. Ask "What does your organization know and believe about psychological safety?" - This is an institutional question about https://hbr.org/2023/02/what-is-psychological-safety
5. Ask "What are your values and how do you hold people accountable to live them?" (Does the org follow their own guidance, or is it just for show?)
6. Ask "What happens to employees who make mistakes?" - is this a 1 and done? This also pairs with psychological safety.
7. Ask "What happens to employees when they challenge the status quo?" (As an engineer or similar lead technological role, you will be continually pushing tech. How does the company respond to that?)
8. And for you to ask yourself: "Is the interview conversational or scripted?"
9. Was the interview genuine happiness, or faked? Would the people you would work with actually happy what they're doing?
10. How do you feel after the interview? Is there something that felt off? Can you identify it?
Prepared questions indicate you have initiative and do your homework. I'm hiring thinkers, not drones.
The only turn-off could be in the way they asked the questions and followed up -- aggressive? Not listening to my response closely? Not clarifying if I asked for more information?
An interview is supposed to be a bidirectional conversation to see if you fit with the manager/company and the company fits with you. Obviously, how you ask (and don't ask), and ask around these questions can really give an idea what to expect.
There's also major red flags for places that you probably never want to work at. For example, dismissive managers are a major problem. What are they going through on a day-to-day? They probably can't tell you, but you can ask around them.
Why are they interviewing? Is it a new position, or a replacement? Why did the replacement leave? I had one interview that the person leaving was also on the interview committee. Really nice gentleman. He was retiring, and wanted to move back with family across the US. And he was on the committee to help find a person and train them to be there. The job wasn't exactly what I was looking for and declined, but I greatly respected how they did that interview.
Again, I interview primarily for engineering roles. Maybe other non-engineering roles do things differently. But I like to try to get a snapshot what the company's like, their expectations, my expectations, and how my life is working there. Last thing I want to do is accept a position and find out they grossly misrepresented the position to get me in the door, and make it hard to interview/switch to get out.
An organization that is aligned with the communications patterns outlined in those questions would answer those questions comfortably.
I gave a list of types of questions I use to try to discern the manager and the company's perspective. Obviously these aren't to be utilized rapid-fire in a dismissive attitude. However, that's exactly how companies approach interviews. Why isn't it good for me to do the same that's being done to me?
> if you asked me a couple of those questions (especially back-to-back) during an interview, I would not hire you.
(The personal response) And there's no way I'd want to work with or for you with that kind of "you ask too many questions" attitude.
> It isn't that any of those are bad questions per se, but the volume and forwardness of them would be a red-flag that this is a person who likes to show up, make trouble, and not be held accountable for it.
I've also been in workplaces that fired after one fuck-up that was due to miscommunication, bad documentation, or other 3rd party factors. I'm not normally accustomed to making mistakes in my professional area, but they do happen. "How are failures and changes handles in your org?" is a massive key indicator of how this org maintains and grows, and I along with it.
And as an engineer, I get *paid* to ask questions, including those pointed ones that get to the root of a matter. And I apply those skills and abilities to interview processes as I would to any other process. To see a hiring manager dismiss this type of interactive discussion as "someone who makes trouble", is the very type of manager I recommend to be fired on my reviews.
> Maybe that's not your goal, but remember that in an interview you only have a few minutes to communicate where you're coming from.
And the implied contextural clues you typed here indicates that it's the interviewer's to ask the questions, and the candidate to shut up unless spoken to, except for a softball one-off question at the end.
Interviews are a 2 way street. You're interviewing me, and I'm ALSO interviewing you. My questions I ask that probe to a company culture and happiness of the interviewers is of utmost importance. I've turned down higher-paying higher-stress jobs precisely because people on the team balked at work-life balance questions.
Another company had a manager roll their eyes when I asked if they would work the position they were hiring for. Just what exactly did I dodge by discontinuing the interview?
One company blatantly stated that "full time ie expected to be 50 hours minimum" when I asked how maintenances were handled with scheduling. And they're a BIG vehicle company. 6 sigma, ISO 20000, yadda yadda. Absoluutely no life balance, and the interviewing manager made that known.
I've dodged a LOT of crap companies with these sorts of questions. Yours sounds like one as well, with your response.
No offense.
So, it can actually still be a useful candidate side filter. If you don’t hire me because I asked these questions, that’s good for me because I don’t want to work for you (not in an accusatory manner, just we probably don’t have compatible workplace expectations).
That's not a good question because it assumes the other person if familiar with the jargon term "psychological safety," which seems pretty new. That's not reasonable because that recent HBR article you posted indicates that many people don't know what that term means.
Also "psychological safety" could be easily misinterpreted in today's political environment as something related a demand for an (ideologically) "safe space."
After skimming that article, it would probably be better to ask something along the lines of "is it OK to make mistakes in this organization and learn from them?"
Organizations that aren't scripted just haven't gotten there yet.
Answering "no" could easily land me in hot water, regardless of my reasons, and especially if I don't explain them very clearly and objectively. Answering "yes" doesn't tell you anything; after all, I already work here and might have drunk the company kool-aide.
It just seems like you're looking for a reason to not work here, instead of looking for reasons to be excited about working here. Walking in the door with a negative attitude is a good way to poison a team's working environment. You are, in effect, the very toxic thing you are trying to reveal.
Maybe it's just cultural differences, but I cannot imagine a reason to ask that question of anyone other than someone who I trust and know well.