Job Interview Questions to Ask to Learn About Organizational Culture
Every company has a unique organizational culture. You can learn about them in a company’s job interview, posted job requirements, employee expectations, and internal communication processes.
Better still, remote work, and the mass shift in focus to organizational culture, affords today’s professionals the privilege to pick and choose companies to find the one most aligned with their personal values. Be that as it may: it’s still pretty hard to understand the culture from the outside.
In the age of social media-perfect job feeds and profiles, it’s hard to see what a company’s organizational culture might be before you start work at a company.
Here are six job interview questions to ask to learn about a company’s organizational culture. Try asking them during the initial stages of the job interviews to help identify potential red flags.
1. Do you use any project management methodologies?
The question can be crucial. If a company already has a set methodology, such as Kanban, Scrum or the waterfall model, it generally means they know what are they doing and have identified a strategy.
Companies that don’t have a project-management methodology might mean you either have to learn how they operate and change your processes to align with their unwritten rules, or you have to help them build their own methodology. This can be really fun but take a lot of time and energy for your primary role.
2. How often do your processes or methodologies change?
The question might reveal if a company is obsessed with processes or methodologies.
Seek to understand if the organization sticks to one fundamental practice and makes a few incremental changes to align with the needs of their team. If they try every new thing, it could indicate a lack of focus or processes that eat up a lot of your time—both potential red flags.
3. Which tools do you use to manage your processes?
Many tools help organizations manage processes, especially for remote teams. Some popular tool combinations are:
Knowing a company’s preferred tools can show you what you need to learn. Similarly, a company might not have a focused project management methodology if they use too many to-do lists or task-management boards and integrations.
4. How many days does it take to approve a new feature?
Many recruiters do not expect software engineers to ask this question. The question also has the added bonus of potentially helping you stand out as a programmer.
Culturally, the question can perfectly show you how agile or lean the company is.
Does a company have one or two key people that work on a product? Do they have a dedicated product manager and strategy that clearly sets the product development expectations and process?
You might find out they have a ton of committees that need to approve each step, the outcome of each, which may change your single task into several tasks. Nothing is more frustrating than to throw away all of your work because a new decision was made, and your feature or work is no longer relevant.
5. How often does the team communicate?
Every candidate should know this, especially if you will be working remotely. Being on the same page with everyone is crucial, especially if you are a software engineer.
Make sure you are not out and about or expected to learn things on your own. Ask how often you need to communicate your progress and who you will report to about your work. Find out who will review your code pull requests. See if you will get information about the company and product-development strategies.
6. Is there a dedicated person or manual for onboarding?
You should know if you can quickly align with a company’s processes, as it can help reveal how productive you might be at work.
Learn their release dates, which branches to work on, and how their pipeline is. If you don’t have a dedicated person or manual, there’s a chance you could break their system a few times or not work as efficiently as you otherwise would.
This article was written by Anna Grigoryan for HackerNoon and was lightly edited and republished with permission.