what questions should I ask in an internal interview with people I already work with?

A reader writes:

I’m fairly new to the workforce (~3 years) and, between a time-limited paid fellowship and moving cities for grad school, I’ve changed jobs a couple of times.

My current role is the first time I’ve been eligible to apply for a new role within my same organization, and while the job market makes me suspect that hordes of qualified people will be jumping on this posting, I’m optimistic about my chances. The organization would definitely prefer to hire internally if they can. I’ve already been cross-trained on some of the functions of this new role, and I know I can talk intelligently about my approach to the work in an interview.

But what do I do when they ask at the end of the interview if I have any questions for them? These are all people I work with on a weekly basis and, thanks to the cross-training, I have a decent sense of how this role’s supervisor manages and how the team works together. I already have a good handle on the organizational culture since I’ve been here over a year.

Coming up with questions for the ends of interviews is already something I struggle with, and I honestly have no idea what would be useful to find out as someone who already works here.

Think of this less as “questions I ask at an interview” — which I suspect is keeping you mired in more the more traditional questions you might ask when you’re an external candidate — and more as “questions I truly have when I think about what it would be like to be in this job long-term.”

Because I bet that you do have some questions, even though you know the team already! For example, wouldn’t it be useful to know things like:

• What do you expect to be the biggest challenges in this position in the next year / what have previous people in the role found to be the biggest challenges?

• What will be the most important things for the person in this job to accomplish in the next six months?

• How does the success of the person in this position get measured?

• What’s the difference between doing an okay job in this position and doing a really great job at it?

Plus, your familiarity with them means that you can ask deeper, more nuanced questions of your interviewers — which also reinforces to them that you might be more ready to take on the job than someone coming in completely new. For example:

• In the adjacent work I’ve been doing with you, I’ve seen that (aspect of work/culture/etc.) has been (fantastic/slightly challenging/especially interesting/etc.) because (reason). Can you tell me more about (what your experience has been like with that/how you’ve seen that play out on the team/how that’s likely to play out in the day-to-day work for this position)?

• I know you’ve been putting a lot of work into getting a new X ready to roll out. What’s the timeline looking like for that, and how is that likely to impact the work of this role?

• How have the changes to X been affecting this position / the team?

But beyond that, think about what you really want to know. When you think about doing the work every day and being on this specific team, what’s still unclear to you? What do you wish you knew? People sometimes feel stumped about what questions they should be asking in an interview because they get too into the mode of “what should I ask that will reflect well on me,” but generally if you really think about it, there’s lots of stuff you don’t know yet and might like to.

(Also, this isn’t what you’re asking about, but always with internal interviews, don’t assume your interviewer knows the details of your work or your accomplishments, even though they’ve worked with you. They might have forgotten, or never have known, or might even be prohibited from considering anything not specifically presented in your interview. Explain your work and skills the same way you would to an interviewer at another company.)

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