Best Question you’ve ever been asked?

There’s no one question that is great—it’s reading the flow of the conversation and digging into topics. That said, a few pointers on where people go wrong:

1) we aren’t on a date—I always find the question “what do you do for fun outside of work?” or a variant like that to be weird and not appropriate for the setting

2) “Could you talk about climbing the learning curve?” Wtf are you supposed to do with this question. It would be like me asking how you learned to ride a bike—Yeah, I fell off a bunch, but eventually could do it. This question sucks and everyone asks it. 

3) don’t ask questions you know the answer to. It really bothers me when I get canned questions that I can tell you know what I am going to say. It’s just a waste of time. I get you are talking to me to have me give you a referral or to build consensus in the group you are a good candidate and that you might have had numerous convos with people in my group, but you should be able to come up with different questions or at least subjective questions that you can’t know the answer to.

The best questions show critical thinking ability and build off information you gained from others or from me. Questions such as what do you think makes your bank or group different/ unique compared to others is great because it’s subjective and can help you figure out why that bank might actually be a good place to work for. Also great are asking about misconceptions people had coming into the job or things they wish they would have known when they were in your shoes.