Questions to Ask at the End of an Interview, Sorted by Who's Asking You

“Do you have any questions for me?”

Every interviewer asks it, usually with five minutes left on the clock. Most people answer with the same three questions no matter who’s on the other end of the call. Ask a recruiter what your first 90 days will look like and you get a guess. Ask a future teammate about the salary band and you make them squirm. Ask a hiring manager how many rounds are left and you just spent your five minutes on something the recruiter could have told you in an email.

The person across the table decides which questions are worth asking. A recruiter, a hiring manager, a peer and a panel each know different things about the job, and each one can only answer their own part of it.

I’ve been on both sides of that question. I recruited for technical roles at one of the largest staffing firms in the country, ran the first interview, and decided who moved on to the next round. Then I switched careers, and in 2024 I sat through twelve interviews as a product designer, ten of which ended in a no.

The lists that rank for this question sort by topic: the company, the role, the culture. They work better once you know which question to spend on which person, since you only get two or three per conversation.

Who can answer what

Each person in your loop owns a different part of the hire. I went through the chain of command in recruiter vs. hiring manager. The short version: the recruiter owns the process, the hiring manager owns the outcome, and your future teammates own the day-to-day you’d actually be living in.

Questions to ask a recruiter

The recruiter is the only person in the loop whose job is the process itself. That makes them the right person for every logistical question, including the one about money.

1. What does the rest of the process look like, and how many rounds are left?
2. When do you expect the team to make a decision?
3. What's the budgeted range for this role?
4. Is this a new role or a backfill? If it's a backfill, what happened with the last person?
5. What is the hiring manager most focused on for this hire?
6. Who will I meet in the next round, and what does each person cover?
7. (Agency recruiters) Would I be employed by your firm or by the client? Is there another firm between you and the client?

Ask the range

You’re allowed to, and the recruiter usually has it. As of October 2026, 14 states plus Washington, D.C. require the range in the job posting itself: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Virginia and Washington. California, Rhode Island and Massachusetts also require employers to give it when an applicant asks, and Nevada requires it once you’ve completed an interview. If the posting already lists a range, ask where in it the team expects to land.

That question also lines up with what a recruiter is checking on the phone screen: they need to know the number works before anyone spends more time. Asking it yourself saves you both a round.

Ask why the seat is open

New headcount usually means the team is growing. A backfill means someone left, and the recruiter can often tell you whether they were promoted, moved teams or quit. Accountemps suggests asking it outright: “Who was in the role before me, and why did they leave?” Alison Green, who writes Ask a Manager, puts the stakes plainly: if no one has stayed in the job long, “it might be a red flag about a difficult manager, unrealistic expectations, or some other landmine.”

Ask who employs you

This one is for agency recruiters, and it’s the one I know from the inside. Most of the people I placed were technically employees of my staffing firm who worked on-site at the client. Others worked for a different staffing firm that we subcontracted through, with my firm as the prime contractor. Same desk, same client badge, three possible employers on paper. Your paycheck, benefits and the person you call when something goes wrong all depend on which one it is.

Questions to ask the hiring manager

The hiring manager is the person whose opinion of your work decides the hire, and whose management decides what the job feels like after you take it. Gallup attributes about 70% of the variance in team engagement to the manager. Spend your questions finding out what kind of manager this is.

1. How will you measure success in this role at 90 days, and at a year?
2. What's the first problem you'd want this person to take off your plate?
3. Think of the best person you've seen in this role. What made them good at it?
4. How often do you meet one-on-one with your team, and what do those meetings usually cover?
5. What's changing on the team or in the product over the next six months?
6. Are there any reservations you have about my fit for the role that I could address?

The success question does the most work. Green’s reasoning: the answer can show that the manager “actually cares most about skill C or responsibility D,” even when the job description led with something else. If the manager can’t answer it at all, that’s worth noticing too. With 46% of employees saying they clearly know what’s expected of them, a vague answer here tells you which half you’d probably land in.

The one-on-one question asks whether this person talks to their team about anything besides tickets, and in Gallup’s 2024 data, 45% of people who quit said nobody had that conversation with them before they left.

The best-person question is Green’s too. It gets the manager describing a real person instead of a wish list, which is usually more honest.

Questions to ask a future teammate

A peer interview is the only place in the loop where you’re talking to someone who does the job you’d be doing, reports to the manager you’d report to, and has less reason to sell you on it. Jeremy Eskenazi of Riviera Advisors told SHRM that “in-demand candidates today will ask to meet their prospective team members, and if the company declines, they move on.” If nobody on the team is in your loop, it’s fair to ask the recruiter whether you can meet someone.

1. What does a normal week look like for you?
2. How much of your week goes to meetings, and how much to the actual work?
3. When the team disagrees on a decision, how does it usually get settled?
4. Who outside the team do you work with most?
5. What do you wish you'd known before you joined?
6. How long have you been here, and what's kept you?

Keep these about the work. A peer who says “honestly, the meetings are a lot” has told you something real. A peer you’ve just asked to rate their manager has been put in a spot, and anything they say will be careful.

Questions to ask a panel

A panel is several conversations happening in one room, and a question aimed at “the team” usually gets a polite answer from whoever talks first. SHRM’s reporting on team interviews describes panels where each interviewer covers specific dimensions, then scores the candidate on a shared template. So aim each question at the person who owns that part of the job.

• Name the person: “This one’s for you, Priya, since you mentioned the analytics rebuild: how far along is it?” Tying it to something they said is also a follow-up, which comes up again below.
• If there’s time, one question each for two or three people beats three questions for the most senior person in the room.
• Watch who answers. SHRM flags that when a panel mixes a manager and their reports, “the employees often let the manager dominate the interview.” If the manager answers a question you aimed at a peer, that tells you something about the team, too.

If a skip-level or an executive is in the loop, keep it to one question about direction, since they’re the only person who can answer it: “What would make this team’s work matter more to the company a year from now?” I didn’t find research on skip-level interviews, so treat that as my own reasoning.

If you’re interviewing for a design role

Designers get their own questions because the thing that decides whether the job is good or miserable is usually structural, and none of it is in the posting.

My first product design roles were freelance, at small software companies in Denver where I was often the only designer. I did the research, the user flows and the Figma components, all of it. Then I joined Sortly, where I worked with product managers, engineers and other designers every day. Same job title, very different ratio.

1. How many designers and how many engineers are on the team I'd join?
2. When does user research usually happen: before the work starts, during, or after launch?
3. Who runs research, and can designers talk to users directly?
4. Are designers embedded in product teams, or shared across several?
5. How does design critique work here, and who's in the room?
6. How often do you ship, and what happens to a feature after it launches?

Questions 1, 2, 4 and 6 come from product designer and UX coach Matej Latin, who treats more than seven developers per designer as a red flag. That’s his cutoff, and it’s stricter than what most teams report. In a 2020 Nielsen Norman Group survey of 377 people, the typical ratio was one researcher to five designers to 50 developers, and half of respondents had at least one designer per ten developers. NN/g adds a caveat worth repeating: a better ratio alone “does not mean greater maturity or impact.” Ask the follow-up about where research happens before you read too much into the number.

These are also good hiring manager questions if the loop doesn’t include another designer. If it includes a design challenge, ask the critique question after it, since you’ve just seen how they give feedback.

Questions to skip

• Anything the website answers. In a CareerBuilder survey of 2,201 hiring managers, fielded in late 2013, 39% named appearing uninformed about the company or role as a damaging mistake. “So what does the company do?” is that mistake out loud.
• Pay and time off as your only questions for the hiring manager. Green’s point is that if your questions are all about “benefits, pay, and vacation time, you’re signaling that you’re not interested in the job itself.” Those questions are fine. Take them to the recruiter.
• Personal questions. 17% of hiring managers in the same CareerBuilder survey counted asking them as a mistake.
• “Did I get the job?” Nobody in the room can answer it yet. Ask about next steps and timing instead, which gets you the same information without making it awkward.

The one people argue about

“Do you have any hesitations about me?” Green calls that version “too aggressive,” because it “puts your interviewer on the spot” and sounds like a car salesperson closing a deal. Career coach Lisa Quast, writing for Forbes, recommends a version of it because it gives you a chance to address a concern before you leave. Both pieces are more than a decade old, and the question still shows up on page one of the search results today.

Green’s softer phrasing is the one I’d use: “Are there any reservations you have about my fit for the position that I could address?” She says the last part is the key, since it gives the interviewer an easy way to answer honestly or to pass. Save it for the hiring manager, and skip it with a peer.

The bigger risk is asking nothing. In the same 2013 CareerBuilder survey, 32% of hiring managers named “not asking good questions” as a damaging mistake. The red flags that end a candidacy faster are in interview red flags recruiters hate.

How many questions to bring

Indeed’s guidance for employers tells interviewers to leave 5 to 10 minutes at the end for your questions. That’s room for two or three real questions and the conversation they start. The candidate-side lists all disagree on a number (two to three, three to four, seven to ten), and none of them is based on research.

Here’s what I’d do: bring five or six per person, because they’ll answer some before you get to ask. Then ask two or three, and follow up on at least one answer.

The follow-up matters more than the count. A 2017 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ran get-to-know-you chats between strangers and found that people who asked more questions were liked more by their partners. Follow-up questions drove it, meaning the ones that built on what the other person had just said. The authors also say the effect may flip if you ask too many, that it may work differently in competitive settings, and that they never tested job interviews. So read it as directional. It still matches what an interviewer wants from the last five minutes: some sign you were listening for the other fifty-five.

Reflective Coda

End-of-interview questions work best as research. You’re finding out whether you want this job, and each person in the loop has a different piece of that answer. The recruiter knows the money and the timeline. The hiring manager knows what you’d be judged on. The peer knows what Tuesday afternoons feel like.

Ask the wrong person and you get a polite non-answer. Ask the right one and you walk out knowing something the job description didn’t tell you, which is also what makes the question sound good to the person answering it.

Copy the lists, cut them down to the two or three that matter most for you, and write down what each person says. You’ll want the notes for your thank-you email, and later on, when you’re deciding whether to counter an offer.

“Do you have any questions for me?” is the one part of the interview where you run the conversation. Spend it on the right person.