My Favourite Interview Question

… and why it works.

Whenever I love an idea and find it relevant to what I do, I “steal” and quickly test it. This time, the idea came from the podcast “Invest Like the Best - Finding Undiscovered Talent, with Daniel Gross”. As I was interviewing quite a few people at work in the past few weeks, I tested it immediately.

The question is simple yet powerful: How do you think this conversation's going?

I find it so good because:

• You cannot hide from it.

• You cannot rehearse the answer to it.

• You do not have to perform. This question relaxes the environment. Instead of “performing”, you introspect. You’re genuine.

The answer to this question can reveal many things. Whenever I was asking it towards the end of my interviews, I invariably got something valuable: an interesting viewpoint, a summary of the things that the person found important, a feeling. The answers added colour to the personality, either revealing another interesting angle, or enhancing the qualities that I’ve already sensed during the interview. Either way, what we get from the answer is very precious.

P.S. In the beginning of my “My Career Map” sessions, I like asking a different variant of this question: “How do you feel?” If we do the session online using MURAL as a support, I sometimes include the Emotion Wheel on our virtual whiteboard. It helps identify and express an emotion or a mix of them.

Thinking back to a few of my recent sessions, especially those where I felt I and my guest did not manage to build strong relationship and trust, or when it did not live to my guest’s expectations, I now think that asking “How do you think the session is going?” at least once in the middle of it could have been very helpful to pivot the session towards my guest’s needs… Lesson learned.