How to ask better interview questions in the age of AI

Finding good people has always been hard. Now there’s a new wrinkle: a growing number of candidates use AI to write their resumes, rehearse interview answers, and research companies before the first call. That doesn’t make them bad candidates. But it does mean the interview questions you’ve been asking for years may not be giving you quite all the information you need.

This guide covers the types of questions that hold up in today’s hiring environment, the ones to avoid, and how to build a process that helps you make better, faster decisions.

Why interview questions need to change in the age of AI

AI hasn’t changed what you’re looking for in a candidate. But it has changed how candidates show up for interviews.

• Resumes today are often keyword-optimized, which makes it harder to gauge real experience from the page alone.
• Standard interview answers—“Describe your biggest weakness” or “Where do you see yourself in five years?”—can be rehearsed, refined, and polished with the help of AI in minutes.
• A candidate who has never managed a team can sound like they have if they’ve practiced the right script.

The result is that surface-level questions are less useful than they used to be. To get a real read on whether someone is the right fit, you need questions that ask for specific examples and require genuine thinking. You want to leave room for the kind of follow-up that a prepared answer can’t anticipate.

Structured interviews can help. In a structured interview, every candidate is asked the same core questions and evaluated against consistent criteria. That approach can reduce inconsistency in the hiring process and make candidate evaluations more objective.

Just as important is the quality of the questions themselves.

What makes a good interview question in 2026?

A strong interview question is specific and tied to the role. It should be designed to reveal *how* a candidate actually works, not just what they can do.

Before you sit down with a candidate, check your questions against this list:

• Does it connect directly to something the person will do in this role?
• Does it ask for a real example or a realistic scenario?
• Does it invite the candidate to explain their thinking, not just their outcome?
• Can you follow up on the answer to go deeper?
• Can you ask this same question to every candidate so you’re comparing apples to apples?

If most of your current questions don’t pass that test, the sections below offer better options.

Types of interview questions employers should ask

The following types of questions can help move the conversation beyond polished AI-assisted answers. They can reveal how a candidate thinks, works, and applies their experience in real situations.

Skills-based interview questions

Use these to find out whether a candidate has the abilities listed on their resume. Rather than asking candidates to talk generally about a skill, these questions encourage them to explain how they've used it in practice.

Examples:

• “Walk me through how you would handle [a specific task from this role].”
• “What tools or processes have you used to complete this type of work?”
• “Can you describe a project where you used this skill successfully?”
• “What would you do first if you were assigned [a realistic job scenario]?”

Fill in the brackets with something specific to your business. Candidates can often provide more useful details when responding to a specific scenario.

Behavioral interview questions

Behavioral questions ask candidates how they handled real situations in the past. They're useful because they require a genuine story rather than a theoretical one. A candidate who has actually navigated a difficult conversation or managed competing priorities will be able to tell you what happened.

Examples:

• “Tell me about a time you had to solve a problem with limited information.”
• “Describe a time you received difficult feedback. What did you do next?”
• “Tell me about a time you had to manage competing priorities.”
• “Describe a time you worked with someone whose communication style was different from yours.”

Problem-solving interview questions

These questions show you how a candidate thinks through uncertainty. Good problem-solving questions are grounded in realistic job situations and reveal whether the person will ask the right questions, gather information before acting, and adjust when things don’t go as planned.

Examples:

• “How would you approach a project if the goals were unclear?”
• “What information would you need before making a decision?”
• “How would you prioritize three urgent requests from different people?”
• “What would you do if your first solution didn’t work?”

Communication interview questions

Communication issues can impact productivity, collaboration, and project outcomes. These questions help assess how someone shares information, adapts their message to different audiences, listens effectively, and handles challenging conversations.

Examples:

• “How do you explain something complex to someone outside your area of expertise?”
• “Tell me about a time you had to communicate bad news at work.”
• “How do you keep your manager or teammates updated on where a project stands?”
• “What does good communication look like on a busy team?”

AI-readiness interview questions

Most roles today involve some interaction with AI tools, whether that’s a customer service rep using an AI assistant, an operations person running reports through an AI platform, or a marketer using AI to draft content. Understanding how a candidate approaches these tools—and where they exercise judgment—is a reasonable thing to assess.

There’s no single right answer to these questions. You’re looking for self-awareness and thoughtfulness, not a particular response.

Examples:

• “How have you used AI tools in your work?”
• “When would you use AI to help with a task, and when would you avoid it?”
• “How do you check AI-generated work for accuracy?”
• “Tell me about a time you used technology to work more efficiently.”

Interview questions to avoid

Some questions invite rehearsed answers. Others can create legal risk. Both are worth avoiding.

Questions and prompts that invite canned responses

• “What’s your biggest weakness?” Every candidate has a prepared answer. Ask instead: “Tell me about a skill you’re actively working to improve and what you’re doing to build it.”
• Brain teasers unrelated to the job. These don’t predict job performance and tend to reward a specific type of test-taking over actual skill.
• “Tell me about yourself.” This common interview prompt often produces broad answers that don't reveal much about job-related skills or experience.

Questions that create legal or compliance risk

Federal employment law prohibits using certain information in hiring decisions. Asking questions that invite candidates to reveal protected-class information, even unintentionally, can create liability.

Avoid questions that touch on:

• Age or date of birth
• Pregnancy, family plans, or childcare arrangements
• National origin, citizenship status, or native language
• Religion or religious observances
• Disability or medical history
• Marital status

If you’re unsure whether a question crosses a line in your state, check with an employment attorney. State laws vary, and some states have stricter rules than federal minimums.

How to use follow-up questions to get past prepared answers

Follow-up questions are one of the most useful tools in an interview. They encourage candidates to expand on their answers, provide additional context, and share details that may not come up in an initial response. This often leads to a clearer picture of their experience and approach to work.

Keep a few of these in your back pocket for any question where the first answer feels thin:

• “What was your specific role in that?”
• “What trade-offs did you consider?”
• “What would you do differently next time?”
• “How did you measure whether it worked?”
• “What was the hardest part?”
• “How did you know your approach was the right one?”

You don’t need to ask all of them. One or two well-timed follow-ups may tell you more than adding another prepared question to your list.

How to structure interviews more effectively

A few changes to how you run interviews can make your decisions more consistent. They can also make it easier to defend if you’re ever asked about your hiring practices.

• Define criteria early. Identify the skills and qualities you're evaluating before the first interview, not during it.
• Standardize core questions. Use the same core questions with every candidate for the same role. It's the best way to make fair comparisons.
• Use a simple scorecard. A 1–5 rating scale across three or four key criteria is often enough to evaluate candidates.
• Include a practical assessment. When appropriate, add a short writing sample, a realistic task, or a scenario review. These exercises can reveal strengths that may not surface in conversation alone.
• Align interviewers. Brief everyone conducting interviews on what strong answers look like before they begin.
• Document feedback immediately. Memory fades quickly. Capture your observations right after the interview so you have clear, consistent notes when comparing finalists.
• Keep human oversight. If you're using AI tools to build questions or scorecards, ensure a person remains responsible for evaluating candidates and making final hiring decisions.

How AI can help employers prepare for interviews

The same AI tools your candidates are using to prepare can also help you run better interviews. More than 3 in 4 small and midsize businesses now use AI regularly, according to the Intuit QuickBooks 2026 AI Impact Report. That usage has translated into higher productivity across business processes, including marketing, customer service, and team management.

Hiring can be part of that equation, too. AI can help reduce some of the upfront work involved in interview planning.

• Paste a job description into an AI tool and ask it to generate skills-based or behavioral questions specific to the role.
• Ask it to suggest follow-up questions for common interview responses.
• Use it to build a candidate scorecard with criteria tied to the job requirements.

Review anything AI generates before you use it. AI-produced questions can sometimes be generic, inadvertently biased, or poorly matched to your actual business context. You know your team and your role better than any AI tool does. Use it to save time, not to outsource your judgment.

How QuickBooks can help with hiring and workforce management

Finding the right person is just the beginning. Once you've made the hire, you still need to handle offer letters, new hire paperwork, payroll setup, tax withholdings, time tracking, and onboarding—all of which take real time when you're running a small business without a dedicated HR team.

QuickBooks Workforce is a team management solution that brings payroll, HR, benefits, and time tracking into one place, so you're not jumping between disconnected systems every time someone joins your team. For small businesses building a hiring process, that connected setup can take a lot of the administrative work off your plate.

With QuickBooks Workforce, you can:

• Streamline onboarding with digital forms and employee self-service tools.
• Manage payroll and tax setup from the same platform where employee information is stored.
• Track time and attendance without relying on separate systems or manual processes.
• Offer and manage benefits, including employee health benefits, alongside payroll and HR tasks.
• Reduce administrative work so you can spend more time developing your team and growing your business.

Hiring with confidence in the age of AI

AI is a tool on both sides of the interview table now. Candidates use it to prepare. You can use it to build better questions, sharper scorecards, and a more consistent process.

Hiring still requires context and judgment. And once you've found the right person, QuickBooks Workforce helps simplify what comes next by bringing payroll, HR, benefits, and time tracking into one place. That means less time spent managing paperwork and processes, and more time focused on helping new employees succeed.