Reverse Interviewing Your Future Manager and Team

This resource first appeared in issue #119 on 23 Apr 2022 and has tags Managing Your Career: Other

Reverse Interviewing Your Future Manager and Team - Gergely Orosz

There’s no perfect jobs, but there are bad jobs, and there are overall good jobs which nonetheless are a very bad match to what you personally prefer and want to be doing every day.

Once you get an offer you can start reverse-interviewing in earnest. I don’t mean the “what does success look like in this role” kind of question you ask in the last 5 minutes of a 60 minute interview slot, I mean really digging deep to figure out what working in the job would actually be like. Especially if you have a couple of offers (and todays environment is very conducive to getting multiple offers), the information uncovered here can help guide you to a choice you’ll be happy with for a few years.

Besides any specific questions that you have after thinking about the role and the organization - anything which seems odd or surprising to you - Orosz and some of his colleagues contribute some pretty good general purpose questions for the hiring manager but also senior peers you’d be working with:

What are you most excited about for the next six months?
What did your typical workweek look like for the past month?
How would you describe the team dynamics
What advice would you give the new hire to be successful?
Hsa anyone left the team? What was the reason?
Can you show a non-trivial code review [LJD - or migration or update or…]?
What separates a good day from a bad day for you? (and then dig into how often the bad days occur and what causes them)
What do you like and dislike about the manager?
Who did they last promote on the team, and why?
How supportive are they as a manager?

Even if the answers only solidify your decision to join the new company, they will be useful for giving you a head start, knowing better what to expect in your first months.