The three questions we ask before we talk about the job

Why our hiring conversations start with your life rather than your résumé.

Most interviews open the same way. Walk me through your CV. Where do you see yourself in five years. Tell me about a time you handled a difficult stakeholder. They're reasonable questions, and they measure a real skill: how well someone performs in an interview.

Nobody turns up to work wanting a job. They turn up carrying a life, and the job is either helping them build it or quietly taking from it. Most companies never find out which, because they never ask.

The tool he uses is an exercise called the Three Most Important Questions. There are only three, they take about twenty minutes to answer honestly, and most people find the last one hardest.

What experiences do you want to have?

Not goals. Experiences. The distinction does real work, because goals tend to arrive pre-sanded by what seems achievable. Ask someone their goals and you get a promotion, a mortgage, a certification. Ask what they want to experience and the answers get more specific and a lot more honest. Three months working from somewhere with no office. Learning to sail. Being in the room when something they built goes live for the first time. Seeing their kid's school assemblies instead of hearing about them afterwards.

Why we ask: because these are the things people quietly assume a job will cost them. If your honest answer involves a long stretch overseas, or a hard stop at 3pm on Thursdays, we'd rather know that in week one than find out in year two when you resign over it.

How do you want to grow?

This one gets misread as a question about promotion, and it isn't. It covers every capability you'd like to have that you don't have yet, including the ones with no line on an org chart. Technical depth in something you've only touched the edges of. Speaking to a room without your heart going. Reading a P&L properly. Becoming the person a nervous junior comes to first. Patience, which is a skill and not a temperament.

Growth is the part of work that compounds. Salary is spent; skill isn't. A role that pays well and teaches you nothing is a slow trade you only notice you've made about four years in.

Why we ask: it tells us what to put in front of you. The projects we hand out, who we pair you with, which client meeting you sit in on rather than read the notes from. Those decisions get made every week whether or not anyone's told us what you're trying to become.

How do you want to contribute?

The hard one. What do you want to leave behind, and for whom? People reach for something enormous here and then feel embarrassed, so it's worth saying plainly that it doesn't have to be. Bringing three people up behind you is a contribution. Building a thing that saves a team an hour a day, every day, for years is a contribution. So is coaching a junior side on Saturdays that has nothing to do with any of this.

The reason it's worth asking at all is that when people leave a job they liked, money is rarely the real story. The story is usually that the work stopped adding up to anything.

Why we ask: some of what you want to contribute, we can build into your role. Some of it we can only stay out of the way of. Both are useful to know, and only one of them costs us anything.

What we actually do with the answers

We write them down. They come back out at reviews, alongside the usual conversation about performance, and we look at them together: what's moved, what hasn't, what we got wrong.

What we don't do is promise to deliver the list. Some of it has nothing to do with us. The test we're applying is narrower than that, and it's the one Lakhiani keeps coming back to: is this company a vehicle for the person's vision, or a detour from it? A good job doesn't have to grant every item on the list. It does have to be pointed roughly the same direction.

The goal isn't to get your people to adopt your vision. It's to make your company the fastest route to theirs.

Where this goes wrong

It's worth being straight about the failure mode, because we've seen it elsewhere. A company runs the exercise, everyone has a genuinely good afternoon, the answers go into a folder, and nobody mentions them again. That's worse than never asking. You've told people you care about their lives and then demonstrated, slowly and in public, that you didn't.

So the exercise is only worth anything if it changes decisions, and the honest way to keep us to that is to make it your job as well as ours. If you join and nobody has raised your three answers with you within six months, that's a fair thing to raise yourself, loudly.

Try them before you apply

Give yourself twenty minutes and a blank page. Write the three headings, set a timer for five minutes each, and don't edit while the timer runs. Write more than feels sensible and cut afterwards. The first answers out are usually the ones you think you're supposed to want; the useful material tends to show up around minute three.

Then look at what you've got and ask what kind of work would actually move it forward. That's a better filter than any job ad, including ours. If your answers and what we do have nothing to do with one another, a great interview won't fix it, and you deserve to know that before you spend a Tuesday evening on a cover letter.