Are your interview questions stuck in the past?

Most interviews are archaeology. We dig through what a candidate already did and treat the past as a reliable map of the future.

Behavioral questions have earned their spot for good reason. Tell me about a time you handled conflict, walked into a mess, missed a deadline. Past behavior tells you something real. But John Sullivan made a point recently that’s been rattling around in my head: the past only takes you so far, especially for a role where the whole job is navigating what hasn’t happened yet.

He calls it a future-focused interview. Instead of only asking what someone did, you ask what they see coming and how they would act on it.

Try questions like these. What do you think will be the biggest challenge facing this function two years from now? If you had this role and saw that coming, what would you do in your first ninety days to get ahead of it? What’s a trend in our industry that most people are underestimating?

Here’s why it works. Anyone can rehearse a polished story about a past win, and plenty of candidates now have AI helping them rehearse. It’s much harder to fake genuine forward thinking on a problem you haven’t seen the questions to. You learn whether someone actually reads the landscape or just reacts to it. You learn how they think when there’s no right answer to recall.

This isn’t a replacement for behavioral interviewing. It’s the other half of the picture. The past tells you what someone has proven. The future tells you whether they can see around a corner. For any role where the challenges ahead won’t look like the ones behind, that second thing might matter more.

Next time you’re building an interview, save room for one forward-looking question. Watch what it surfaces. My guess is it will tell you more than the résumé walk-through ever did.