Courtesy Paddy Lambros
- Veteran recruiter Paddy Lambros often starts interviews by asking job seekers to ask him questions.
- “Your questions are a huge tell,” said Lambros, CEO and cofounder of the AI startup Dex.
- He said the best candidates usually ask interesting questions and have clearly done their research.
When Paddy Lambros interviews job candidates, he sometimes trips them up from the start.
Rather than asking people about their background or to share why they’re a good fit for the job, the veteran recruiter will often invite them to ask him a question.
Lambros said that the best candidates typically ask the most interesting and insightful questions, and the weaker ones don’t, or haven’t prepared anything to ask. That’s why, after years of conducting interviews, he often starts by asking candidates to go first.
“Your questions are a huge tell,” Lambros told Business Insider.
He said that candidates’ answers often signal what they think about the opportunity and the reality of the job.
“It speaks to just their level of interest, their level of engagement,” and, Lambros said, “how good they would be on the job.”
He came to this method early in his career, he said, after reading various books on sales — thinking of an interview more like a discovery call. Lambros estimates that he’s sat down with more than 10,000 candidates.
Lambros is now CEO and cofounder of Dex, a recruiting company using artificial intelligence to serve as a talent agent and connect software engineers with employers. The London startup’s backers include A16z Speedrun, the Andreessen Horowitz accelerator.
Signs of a top performer
One reason Lambros prefers not to wait until the end to have interviewees ask questions is that it’s now common, he said, for candidates to turn up with “incredibly groomed answers that have been fed through ChatGPT 15 times.”
Yet, he said, it’s often harder for people to come up with insightful questions because, in part, they might not have devoted sufficient thought to what they don’t know about the role.
So, rather than asking banal questions about an organization’s culture, Lambros said, savvy candidates who have thought about a role will ask things like, “‘How would you know that I’m a top performer within 60 days?” or “What is it that will be true about your business in a year if I work here?” or “What kind of outcome do you want to achieve?” and “What could be true about my career if I do really well here?”
Lambros said those types of questions demonstrate that job candidates are thinking about the impact they could have, “because the best people want to feel like they make a difference.”
Inviting prospective hires to ask questions right away isn’t designed to explicitly flummox people, Lambros said. He said, in his experience, that giving people space to ask questions early on makes it more likely they’ll feel like they got something out of the interview and, as such, they become willing to be more open.
“You get a really good insight into what they care about and what they want to know,” Lambros said, adding that having candidates ask questions from the start tends to elicit “deeper and richer answers” in general.
An LLM ‘can’t feign interest’
Having candidates start with their questions could force some job seekers to avoid relying on AI to help them skate through interviews. And any measures that lead to a more “free-form discussion,” where candidates can dig into what they want to know, can highlight when people aren’t well prepared or engaged, he said.
A large language model “can’t feign interest,” Lambros said.
Elizabeth Lotardo, a leadership consultant who is the author of the book “Leading Yourself,” told BI that asking the interview subject to go first with questions is likely especially helpful for roles involving leadership or in areas like sales where employees might have to initiate conversations.
She said the approach might not be as fruitful with roles that are more focused on completing certain tasks or that rely less on interpersonal skills.
Lotardo said that if she faced a you-go-first scenario as a candidate, she might be tempted to ask an interviewer, “What made you want to talk to me?” or “What on my résumé made you reach out?”
Those types of questions, she said, could push an interviewer to sell themselves to a candidate.
Another potential benefit of this approach: Both sides might quickly determine if it’s not a good fit, she said.
“You know what’s on their mind, and if the answer is not what they’re looking for, better to save everyone the time,” Lotardo said.
Lambros likewise sees the approach as a win for highly qualified candidates, who, he said, are always in high demand.
“The very best people are assessing you as much as you are assessing them,” Lambros said.
Do you have a story to share about your job search or interview process? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.