Questions to Ask a Peer in an Interview
For candidates in the peer round, talking to someone who would be a colleague rather than a boss. These questions get at how work actually arrives, who decides things, what the team knows is broken, and why the last person in the role left.
The questions
Open any question for the note
How long have you been on the team, and what were you doing before this?
Why ask it
An easy opener that also tells you the team's tenure. If everyone in your loop joined in the last eight months, the institutional memory left with someone, and that shapes how much you would be figuring out alone.
What were you working on this week?
Why ask it
Far more revealing than asking about a typical week, because it forces specifics. A peer who describes three unrelated fire drills is telling you about the team's planning, without meaning to.
If I joined, what would my first project probably be?
Why ask it
You are checking whether the role has actual defined work waiting or is a hope. Hesitation here often means the team has a budget line and a general sense of need, and the scope will be invented after you sign.
Who would I work with most closely day to day?
Why ask it
Your experience of a job is mostly two or three people, not the org chart. Ask whether those people are on this interview loop, since a peer round that excludes your closest future collaborator is a strange omission.
How does work get assigned here: do people pick things up, or does it come down from a manager?
Why ask it
This is the difference between needing to push for scope and needing to defend your time. Notice whether the description matches what the hiring manager told you, because that gap is common and informative.
What does a normal week look like in terms of meetings versus focused time?
Why ask it
Ask for a number of meeting hours rather than an adjective. If they laugh before answering, follow up with which meetings they would drop if allowed.
How long did it take you to feel useful here, and what helped?
Why ask it
The answer measures onboarding honestly. Six months with no documentation and a lot of asking around means you should plan your own ramp, and it tells you whether the team has capacity to support a new person right now.
What surprised you about the job after you started?
Why ask it
This gives people a socially safe way to mention the gap between the job description and the work. Surprises about tooling or process are normal; surprises about scope or reporting lines are worth digging into.
Who do people go to when they are stuck, and is that person overloaded?
Why ask it
Every team has one, and whether that person is protected or quietly burning out tells you a lot about how the team is run. If the answer is that nobody knows, expect long stretches of solo debugging.
When something goes badly wrong, what happens next?
Why ask it
Listen for whether the story involves a review and a fix, or a search for who to blame. Ask for a concrete recent example, because the general policy and the actual behavior often differ.
How does a decision get made when two people disagree?
Why ask it
You are testing whether disagreements resolve, escalate, or stall indefinitely. Teams where the answer is that things quietly go nowhere tend to have long roadmaps and little shipped.
How much of your week goes to things that are not the actual job: reporting, process, tooling?
Why ask it
This is where enthusiasm quietly leaks away in otherwise good jobs. A precise answer, such as Monday mornings and Thursday afternoons, is more trustworthy than a shrug.
What happened to the last person in this role?
Why ask it
Promoted, transferred internally, left the company or the role is new are four very different situations. If they do not know, ask whether the role has been open a long time, and why they think that is.
What is broken here that everyone already knows about?
Why ask it
Framing it as common knowledge makes it easy to answer without disloyalty. A candid answer is a good sign about the culture; a claim that nothing is broken usually means the peer does not feel safe or has not been there long.
When was the last time you worked a weekend, and why?
Why ask it
This turns the work-life balance question into something checkable. One release weekend a year is a different job from a quarter-end that always spills, and the reason matters as much as the frequency.
What was your last performance review based on?
Why ask it
You are looking for whether evaluation rests on written expectations or on whether a manager noticed. Vagueness here predicts vagueness about promotion and pay later.
Has anyone moved up out of this role recently, and what did that take?
Why ask it
A named example with a timeline is evidence; a statement that growth is available is not. If nobody has been promoted from this seat, ask where people go instead.
What kind of person does well here, and what kind of person leaves?
Why ask it
The second half is where the real answer lives. Descriptions like people who need clear direction or people who want to specialise tell you the team's tolerances more accurately than any values page.
What is the last thing that made you think about leaving, and why did you stay?
Why ask it
A direct question that most people answer honestly because it lets them show loyalty and candour at once. What they weighed on each side is the closest you will get to seeing the job from inside.
Is there anything you would want to know if you were sitting on my side of the table?
Why ask it
This hands the peer permission to volunteer the thing they have been holding back, and it usually surfaces a reorg, a difficult stakeholder or a funding question. Save it for last, once the conversation has warmed up.
Making the Peer Round Work for You
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
How to Use the Peer Round
Remember they are still evaluating you
The peer round almost always feeds into the hiring decision, and in many companies a single peer objection is enough to stop an offer. Ask hard questions, but ask them the way you would ask a future colleague, not an opposing witness.
Ask about last week, not about typical weeks
Specific recent time frames are hard to answer with a script. Compare the answer to what the recruiter and hiring manager told you, and treat the differences as the most useful data in the loop.
Pick four or five questions, not twenty
A peer conversation is usually twenty to thirty minutes, and half of it is theirs. Choose based on what your other interviews left unclear, and let the good answers pull you into follow-ups rather than working through a list.
Ask the same question in two rounds
Put the same question about priorities or the last person in the role to both a peer and the hiring manager. Consistent answers are reassuring; contradictory ones are worth raising directly before you accept.
Reading the Answers
- Watch what happens when you ask something awkward: a pause and an honest answer is a better sign than a smooth one.
- Notice whether they speak about the team as we or as they, and where their manager sits in the story.
- Praise with no specifics is weaker than a complaint with specifics.
- If two peers independently mention the same person or the same process, believe it.
- Someone who cannot name anything they would change either does not feel safe or has not been there long enough to know.
- Enthusiasm about the product with nothing to say about the work is a common pattern in teams under pressure.
What Not to Do
- Do not ask questions the job posting already answers; it reads as not having prepared.
- Do not open with salary, holiday or remote policy, which belong with the recruiter and land badly with a peer.
- Do not ask them to compare themselves with other candidates or to predict whether you will get the offer.
- Do not push a peer to criticise their manager by name; ask about process instead and let them choose what to volunteer.
- Do not spend the whole slot talking. Ask, then be quiet long enough for the second half of the answer.
- Do not skip your own questions because the conversation was pleasant; the peer round is your best window into the daily job.