When preparing for job interviews, most people expect classic questions like: “Please tell us about your experience” or “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?”
These are always safe picks – but some executives have developed their own favorite questions to assess specific traits, such as role understanding or entrepreneurial spirit.
Business Insider asked five female managers, including human resources executives at Walmart and Dayforce, about their tried-and-true recruiting questions.
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Jennifer Van Buskirk, head of business operations at AT&T
Jennifer Van Buskirk has worked at AT&T for over 25 years and leads a team of approximately 20,000 people. people.
A few years ago, she launched a start-up that today operates as Cricket Wireless. She said that while building her dream team, she discovered two recruitment questions that she still uses today to select suitable candidates.
The first one reads: What was the biggest risk you ever took and why?
The second question is: If you were starting all over again, what would you do differently and why?
Van Buskirk said she looks for signs of courage and the ability to dream big in both cases. As a person willing to take risks, he wants to see this feature in potential employees.
“When you're making changes or starting something new, it's really important to have people who can thrive in that environment,” she said.
Francine Katsoudas, Cisco executive vice president and chief people, policy and purpose officer
Cisco's Francine Katsoudas told Business Insider that she usually interviews candidates at the end of the recruiting process, so likes to ask what, based on previous conversations, they think is the most important part of a given role.
“This question helps me understand how they summarized the various conversations they had and how they translated them into what was really needed — sometimes even beyond the job description,” she explained.
She added that this is usually her starting point and gives her “a lot of information” about the candidate.
Amy Cappellanti-Wolf, executive vice president and chief people officer at Dayforce
Dayforce's Amy Cappellanti-Wolf asks a variation on the classic greatest weakness question. Asks about recent constructive feedback that the candidate is actively working on.
She said she allowed both personal and professional responses. She enjoys honest responses and considers it a “problem” if someone says they don't get feedback or have nothing to work on.
— It kind of reveals people's character — their ability to be vulnerable, but also open and honest about what they're working on, because we're all in the making, right? We are all working on ourselves, she said.
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Corinne Sklar, vice president of IBM and managing director of Salesforce
IBM's Corinne Sklar has been asking the same question for 20 years because it helps her assess whether a candidate has entrepreneurial qualities.
The question is: How did you first earn money?
The manager said that she always comes back to it because it allows her to assess whether a given person is resourceful and is not passively waiting for a diploma or a job to start working.
Sklar added that she considers herself such a person. When she was seven, she went door to door selling hand-drawn bookmarks for 25 cents on Halloween. When one woman complained that the bookmark was made of card stock, Sklar offered to laminate it for 50 cents.
“I'm looking for people who won't ask for permission – they'll just execute their own strategy,” she told Business Insider during Monday.com's Elevate event in September 2025.
Donna Morris, executive vice president and chief people officer at Walmart
Walmart's Donna Morris usually interviews management candidates, and her favorite question is open-ended.
It reads: If I asked people who worked for you before, what would they tell me about you?
“You can't really practice it, even if you knew the question,” Morris said.
She added that she likes asking them because the answer naturally leads to a larger conversation. Then he asks questions to get more details about how the candidate sees himself in the workplace and how he works with others.
The above text is a translation from American edition of Business Insider
