Which of a candidate's questions in a screen is a recruiter usually not positioned to answer?

## The dividing line is firsthand knowledge A recruiter is not less informed than the panel; they are informed about a different thing. What they hold firsthand is the **requisition and the process**. What they hold secondhand -- from an intake conversation with a manager, from a job description someone else wrote, from other candidates' feedback -- is everything about the work itself. That single distinction predicts almost every good and bad question in a screen. **Firsthand, ask freely:** - What level the requisition is posted at, and the band for that level - How many stages remain and what each is meant to assess - Elapsed timeline from screen to decision, and scheduling constraints - Whether this is new headcount or a backfill - Whether the role is on a specific team or pooled across several - Location, remote expectations, and travel as written into the requisition - Who you will meet at each round, by role **Secondhand, ask the people who do the work:** - How a system is built, and why the design went that way - What share of the work is new development versus remediation - How code review actually functions, and how long changes take to ship - On-call load, and what a bad week looks like - How the manager behaves under pressure, and how they measure the role - Why a specific person left the team ## A worked example You are in a screen for an application-security role. Useful questions to this audience: what level is the requisition posted at, what is the band for that level and how is level actually decided, how many stages follow and what each assesses, and is this backfilling someone or is it new headcount. The recruiter answers all of them from the requisition and their intake notes: five stages over roughly seven weeks, two of them domain rounds, new headcount on a team that is growing. Now the question that wastes the window: *how does the team decide which findings get remediated first, and who arbitrates when a product team pushes back?* That is a genuinely excellent question -- and it is the security engineers' question, or the manager's. The recruiter will say something plausible and general, and you will not know whether it reflects the team or the job description. You spent your one window and bought an answer you cannot use. ## What to do with the questions you do not ask Do not drop them. Park them on the same process map you are filling in during the screen: each remaining round gets a line, and the questions you re-aimed sit next to the round whose audience owns them. This turns a constraint into preparation. By the time you reach the domain rounds you already have two or three questions written specifically for the people in them, which reads as far more prepared than improvising at the end. It also helps to use the recruiter as a router rather than a source. "Which of the rounds would be the best one to ask about how remediation work is prioritised?" is a question they can answer well, and it does two things at once: it gets your question to the right audience, and it shows you understand the shape of the process. ## Reading the answers you do get Recruiters relay. When an answer arrives in language that sounds recited -- the phrasing of a job posting rather than of a person -- treat it as a placeholder rather than a fact, and mark it on the map to re-ask the person who owns it. That is not cynicism about recruiters; a relayed answer is simply a lower-confidence source than the practitioner's, and the same claim from an engineer on the team is worth much more. Equally, take an honest "I do not know, but I can ask the manager" as a good sign rather than a bad one. It is a more useful answer than a confident guess, and following up on it later gives you a natural reason to keep the conversation going. ## Why this matters more than it looks The questions you choose are read as evidence of judgment. Aiming deep technical questions at a recruiter suggests you have not thought about who is in the room -- the same habit that, later, produces answers pitched at the wrong audience in a panel. Aiming the right question at the right person is a small, visible demonstration that you calibrate to who you are talking to.