• One of the biggest parts of preparing for a job interview is running through practice questions.
• We asked recruiting pros for their top interview questions and how a candidate should answer them.
• Here's what they told us.

When you're preparing for a job interview, one of the first things you can do is research what previous candidates have shared about their own interviews with that employer. Some of the most helpful information to glean, if you can find it, is what interview questions you might expect to be asked.

To help job seekers who might not be able to find common questions asked by a specific company, we asked five recruiting professionals for their favorite questions to ask in job interviews.

They also broke down how candidates should answer and what the answers can reveal about them. Of course, the slate of questions asked in an interview can vary based on the recruiter's personal preferences, the role, and other factors — but these go-to questions from recruiters are a good place to start.

Here's a look at questions recruiters love to ask that they say can be particularly telling about a candidate.

'Tell me a time when you found a way to improve a process, made something more efficient, or otherwise introduced an improvement when you weren't asked to do so.'

Kyle Samuels, who spent 20 years in senior-level executive recruiting and is now CEO of executive search agency Creative Talent Endeavors, said he likes this question because it helps identify "proactive leaders who are willing to answer difficult questions and drive business results."

He recommends candidates use the STAR method — focusing on the situation, task, action, and result — to answer this question and really highlight their "initiative and drive."

"I'm also looking for candidates who can stand up to additional questioning well and describe specifics within each example or story they share when responding," he said.

He shared with us one example of how a STAR-formatted answer to this question might look:

• Situation: "Our SaaS solution isn't cutting it."
• Task: "I was assigned to fix the problem."
• Action: "I spoke to other CTOs to get recommendations, found a final list of five, and then evaluated them against the incumbent so we could make the right hiring decision."
• Result: Explain the end result and what happened after taking the actions described.

'Tell me about a time when something went terribly wrong with a project.'

This question shows a candidate's "ability to take responsibility for mistakes, solve problems, communicate effectively, and collaborate with others," said Lauren Monroe, who leads the creative practice group at Aquent, a staffing agency for creative, marketing, and design roles.

An ideal answer would "name the specific challenge faced, acknowledge the mistakes made, and identify the actions taken, lessons learned, and solutions implemented to solve the problem," she added.

'What key elements need to be in your next role, and what would be a dealbreaker for you?'

Amri Celeste, a recruitment manager and interview coach, likes this question because it gets at "what a candidate is really looking for in a role and whether the role we're discussing matches what they expect in their next role."

"It's also an opportunity to open up a more honest dialogue about their values, work style, and career goals, which helps me learn about not only how well they suit the role, but also how well they might suit the team and management style of the manager," she said.

'Tell me about yourself.'

It's a tried-and-true interview question, and Andrew Fennell, a former corporate recruiter and the founder of the résumé-builder website StandOut CV, leans on it to set the tone in interviews.

"After introducing myself and explaining how I've arrived to the point of this interview, I ask the candidate to do the same," he said.

"It relaxes the atmosphere a bit, makes it a bit more conversational, and allows the candidate to give a well-rounded summary of their experience and skills," he added.

'Tell me about the greatest impact you made at a company and what helped you achieve that impact.'

Tessa White, a former head of HR, is the CEO of The Job Doctor and the author of "The Unspoken Truths for Career Success."

Besides asking about a candidate's achievements, White also tries to gauge their ability to problem-solve by asking questions about challenges they've encountered in the past.

She'll ask, for example, "Tell me about a time you were at odds with someone or a department and you were able to successfully move through it."

Other times, she might say, "Tell me about a time when an initiative or project you were leading wasn't going the way you hoped. How did you handle it and what is your philosophy for addressing obstacles?"

For all of these questions, she said the ideal answer should be "authentic and real." If it's not, a recruiter can "sniff it a mile away," she said.

"I'm not looking for the answer you think I want to hear," she said. "I'm looking to see an imperfect person that has insight into their strengths as well as someone who understands how to learn from previous mistakes."

• Companies are cracking down on job applicants trying to use AI to boost their prospects.
• 72% of leaders said they were raising their standards for hiring a candidate, a Workday report found.
• Recruiters say standards will tighten further as firms themselves use AI to weed out candidates.

AI was supposed to make the job hunt easier, but job seekers should expect landing a new gig harder in the coming years, thanks to companies growing increasingly suspicious of candidates using bots to get their foot in the door.

Hiring managers, keen to sniff out picture-perfect candidates that have used AI to augment their applications, are beginning to tighten their standards to interview and ultimately hire new employees, labor market sources told Business Insider.

Recruiters said that has already made the job market more competitive — and the selection will get even tighter as more companies adopt their own AI tools to sift through applicants.

In the first half of the year, 72% of business leaders said they were raising their standards for hiring applicants, according to a report from Workday. Meanwhile, 77% of companies said they intended to scale their use of AI in the recruiting process over the next year.

63% of recruiters and hiring decision makers said they already used AI as part of the recruiting process, up from 58% last year, a separate survey by Employ found.

Jeff Hyman, a veteran recruiter and the CEO of Recruit Rockstars, says AI software is growing more popular among hiring managers to weed through stacks of seemingly ideal candidates.

"Ironically, big companies are using AI to go through that stack, that AI has brought first place, and it's becoming this ridiculous tit-for-tat battle," Hyman told BI in an interview. "I would say human judgment … is what rules the day, but certainly, we use a lot of software to reduce a stack from 500 to 50, because you got to start somewhere," he later added.

Tim Sackett, the president of the tech staffing firm HRU Technical Resources, says some firms are beta-testing AI software that can allow companies to detect fraud on résumés — a development he thinks will make the job market significantly more competitive. That technology could become mainstream as soon as mid-2025, he speculated, given how fast AI tech is accelerating.

"It's just going to get worse," Sackett said of companies being more selective of new hires. "I mean, if more candidates become really used to utilizing AI to help them match a job better, to network better, it's just going to happen."

The interview-to-offer ratio at enterprise companies declined to 64% in July of this year, according to Employ's survey, which indicates companies are interviewing fewer candidates before making a hiring decision.

"Recruiters are scrutinizing candidates more closely," Hyman adds. "My candidate interviews have become longer and more in-depth, designed to truly test a candidate's abilities beyond a polished résumé."

Inundated by AI

Employers aren't big fans of AI as a tool for candidates to get a leg up. That's partly because it's led to hiring systems being flooded with applications sent using AI, Sackett and Hyman said, which has made hiring decisions way harder.

Workday found that job applications grew at four times the pace of job openings in the first half of this year, with recruiters processing 173 million applications, while there were just 19 million job requisitions.

Having too many candidates for a position was the third most common problem recruiters faced in 2024, Employ added.

Hyman estimates the number of applications he reviews has doubled over the last year. Some of the more lucrative job postings are seeing close to 1,000 applications, he said, whereas they would have attracted 100-200 applications before the pandemic.

"I mean, a stack so big, that you can't even go through it, it's just not even possible to spend that kind of time," he said.

Candidates sending in applications spruced up with AI has also made it harder to determine who can actually do the job.

Sackett says he's seen an increase in "false positive" hiring, where a worker is hired and is quickly let go of their position when it becomes clear they're unable to do the job.

"I think what hiring managers are concerned about: Is this CV real when I'm talking to this person? Am I talking to the real person or are they using AI in the background?" Sackett said. He recalled one client he worked with who realized multiple candidates responded to interview questions in the same way, likely because they were using AI to write their responses. "So I think people just want to know that I'm getting what I think I'm getting."