Interview Question Generator

Generate targeted interview questions for any role with evaluation criteria and follow-up prompts.

Use this prompt — free See example output

The Prompt

(2 messages)

System

You are a senior hiring manager who designs structured interviews. Generate questions that effectively assess whether a candidate has the skills and traits needed for the role.

Guidelines:
- Mix behavioral ("Tell me about a time...") and situational ("How would you handle...") questions
- Each question should target a specific competency
- Include what a strong answer looks like so interviewers can evaluate consistently
- Add follow-up probes to dig deeper if the initial answer is vague
- Avoid generic questions that don't differentiate candidates
- Order questions from easier (warm-up) to harder (deep assessment)

User

Generate interview questions for this role:

Role: {{role}}
Key skills to assess: {{skills}}
Experience level: {{experience_level}}
Number of questions: {{num_questions}}

Variables

Fill in these inputs to customize your output:

{{role}}

Example: Senior Backend Engineer

{{skills}}

Example: system design, API development, database optimization, mentoring

{{experience_level}}

Example: senior (5+ years)

{{num_questions}}

Example: 4

Example Output

Here's what this prompt generates with the sample inputs:

Sample outputclaude-sonnet-4-5

{
  "questions": [
    {
      "question": "Tell me about a time you had to redesign an API that was already in production with active consumers. How did you approach backward compatibility?",
      "competency": "API development",
      "type": "behavioral",
      "strong_answer": "Describes a versioning strategy, mentions consumer communication, discusses migration plan and deprecation timeline. Bonus: mentions contract testing or feature flags.",
      "follow_ups": [
        "How did you decide between versioning the endpoint vs. making the change backward-compatible?",
        "How did you communicate the change to API consumers?"
      ]
    },
    {
      "question": "Walk me through how you'd design a notification system that needs to deliver 10M push notifications per day with delivery confirmation.",
      "competency": "system design",
      "type": "situational",
      "strong_answer": "Discusses queue-based architecture, delivery tracking, retry logic, and backpressure handling. Considers failure modes and monitoring.",
      "follow_ups": [
        "How would you handle a downstream push provider outage?",
        "What metrics would you track to ensure reliability?"
      ]
    },
    {
      "question": "Describe a query performance issue you diagnosed and fixed. What was the root cause and how did you find it?",
      "competency": "database optimization",
      "type": "behavioral",
      "strong_answer": "Uses EXPLAIN/ANALYZE or equivalent tooling, identifies specific root cause (missing index, N+1, full scan), measures before/after improvement quantitatively.",
      "follow_ups": [
        "How do you proactively catch slow queries before they become incidents?",
        "What trade-offs did you consider with the fix?"
      ]
    },
    {
      "question": "Tell me about a junior engineer you helped level up. What was your approach and what changed for them?",
      "competency": "mentoring",
      "type": "behavioral",
      "strong_answer": "Describes a specific, sustained mentoring relationship. Mentions adapting teaching style to the individual, setting goals, and measuring growth through concrete outcomes.",
      "follow_ups": [
        "How do you balance mentoring with your own deliverables?",
        "What do you do when someone isn't responding to your coaching?"
      ]
    }
  ]
}