How To Ask The Right Question

When you’re interviewing somebody, how do you know what question to ask?

Whether you’re recruiting someone for a job, doing a piece of research, working on a book or an article, interviewing a “celebrity” for a podcast, gathering requirements for an IT or other project, or coaching someone, asking the right questions is essential.

But what kind of questions are the right questions?

It depends on what you would like to happen. The right questions are the questions that get the response you want.

Mostly when I’m interviewing somebody, I’m almost always looking for new information, so I ask questions that are likely to elicit that.

The information might be:

New to me: if I’m interviewing someone because I was to know about something they know about and I don’t

New to my audience: if I’m doing the interview for publication

New to my interviewee: particularly important when I’m coaching and my client wants insights, or if I’m gathering requirements for a project

New to me, my audience and my interviewee: that’s the best! I love to learn stuff that nobody has ever known before.

The structures and questions I use map across to a huge variety of situations where you’re looking to elicit new information from a fairly “friendly” witness.

But of course, not everyone has the same aim in mind when interviewing. There are lots of circumstances where people interview someone in order to confirm what they think they already know – in which case they’ll use different structures, and ask different questions.

So what’s the right question to start with when interviewing?

Probably, to ask yourself: “What would I like to have happen?”