Why "Why Do You Want to Work Here?" Is a Bad Interview Question

"Why do you want to work here?" shouldn't be an interview question.

Or at least, not at the start of one. It's one of the most asked questions in hiring – and one of the least useful. The answer it produces is almost always a rehearsed version of the same three ingredients: a line about the mission, a line about the team, and a line about career growth. Candidates know the game. Interviewers half-listen. Everybody nods. Nobody learns anything.

And yet we keep asking it, right at the top, as if the answer is going to reveal something meaningful. It almost never does.

This piece makes the case for retiring the question from the opening of your interviews – and, if you're determined to keep it, asking it somewhere far more useful instead.

Why we ask it in the first place

There are two honest reasons interviewers ask "why do you want to work here?" – and they're both reasonable goals.

The first is to check whether the candidate has done any research about the company. Did they read the website? Do they know what we actually do? Are they applying because they think we sound cool, or because they spray-applied to everything on LinkedIn that mentioned their job title?

The second is to assess mission alignment. Do the things this company cares about match the things this person cares about? Will they be engaged once the honeymoon wears off, or are they just chasing a paycheque?

Both of these are defensible. Both of these matter. The question is whether this particular question – asked at the start of an interview – is actually the tool that gets you the answer.

Why it fails at both jobs

On research: it's already been done, for free

Candidates are doing far more company research than they used to – whether you ask them about it or not. 75% of job hunters research a company's employer brand before applying. 86% read company reviews. Over half look for more company information after reading the job post. By the time someone sits across from you in an interview, they have almost certainly already been through your careers page, your Glassdoor, your LinkedIn, and probably a dozen other comparable employers they're choosing between.

The question "did you do your homework?" is already being answered before the candidate books a meeting. If you want to confirm that research happened, you don't need a motivation question to do it. The far more revealing signal is the questions they ask you – about the role, the team, the strategy, the recent changes in the market. That's the bit that's hard to fake without doing the reading.

On mission alignment: wrong burden, wrong moment

This one's subtler. The assumption behind "are you mission-aligned?" is that the candidate should arrive already inspired by what the company is trying to do – that passion is the input, and the company is the beneficiary. For most companies, that's the wrong way round.

Unless you're a charity, a deeply cause-driven non-profit, or a very mission-forward start-up with a specific worldview, your candidates are not obliged to care about your mission before walking in. They're obliged to be good at the job. The inspiration part – the bit that makes them want to do the job at your company instead of any of the dozen others they could choose – is your job, through the hiring process.

That's not an argument against having a mission. It's an argument against treating mission-alignment as a filter applied to candidates, rather than a product of the experience you give them.

And the data on candidate experience is blunt about it. 66% of candidates who accept a job offer say the recruitment experience influenced their decision. Organisations that invest in strong candidate experiences improve quality of hire by 70%. The process is where alignment is built, not where it's tested.

What the data says more broadly

Zoom out from this one question for a second. The wider research on interview validity tells you exactly how much slack this kind of question is pulling.

Structured interviews are 34% more predictive of job performance than unstructured ones. Meta-analyses put the corrected correlation for structured interviews in the .42–.55 range, versus roughly half that for unstructured ones. And within the structured-interview toolkit, the question types that actually predict performance are situational and past-behavioural questions – not motivation questions.

Perhaps more damning: only 9% of interview scores correlate with quality of hire. 91% of what happens in a typical interview is, statistically, noise. That's the context in which we spend the opening minutes of every conversation asking "so, why do you want to work here?" – minutes pulled from a budget that's already failing to predict anything meaningful.

Interview time is scarce. Every question you ask is a question you're not asking. If the opening slot goes to a question whose answers all sound the same, that's a real cost – paid in the questions you didn't have time to ask about the actual work.

The obvious push-back

The strongest defence of the question runs like this: even if it's not a predictor of performance, it still gauges enthusiasm. A candidate who stumbles on it, or gives a generic answer, is telling you something. And early in the interview, it's a gentle opener that settles nerves.

There's a grain of truth in the first half. A candidate who can't say anything specific about why they applied probably hasn't applied with much intent. But that's a very low bar – it rules out the worst mass-spray applicants, and it barely distinguishes between everyone else. The candidates you want to tell apart all do the prep. They all have a tidy three-ingredient answer. The question can't separate them.

The "gentle opener" argument is fairer. Interviews benefit from some warm-up. But there are better warm-ups than a question whose answer you're not going to learn anything from. "What drew you to this specific role over the others you're looking at?" is more revealing. "What does a great week look like for you in this kind of job?" is more revealing. Even a thirty-second chat about the weather is more honest than a pseudo-assessment question that everyone – interviewer included – knows is being scored on nothing.

The fix: ask it at the end, not the start

Here's where "why do you want to work here?" becomes genuinely useful: move it to the last question of the last interview.

Asked at the start, it's a test the candidate is being graded on. Asked at the end, it's a diagnostic for you. By that point, they've met the team. They've seen how you work. They've heard how decisions get made, what the first ninety days look like, what the company actually cares about in practice. The answer they give at the end isn't a recitation of your marketing site. It's a real-time report on which parts of your process and your company are winning the best candidates.

That's worth gold. Over a few hires, it tells you which managers are selling the vision well, which stages of the process inspire and which bore, and what your offer looks like from inside a candidate's head after they've seen the whole thing. It turns the question from a low-signal quiz into a continuous-improvement tool.

And because the candidate is answering in earnest by that point – not trying to pass a test – the answer is far more honest. "The way your head of product talked about the roadmap made me want to work on this team" is the kind of thing you only hear if you've given the candidate reason to mean it.

What this looks like in practice

You don't need a big process change. Three adjustments do most of the work:

1. Remove it from the opening. Replace it with a specific, job-related warm-up. "Walk me through what attracted you to this specific role" is a close cousin but much harder to answer generically.
2. Move it to the final interview. Ideally the last question, after the candidate has met the team and seen how the place works. Let them sit with the full picture before they answer.
3. Track the answers. Write them down. After a few hires, patterns emerge – the same elements of your process keep showing up in candidates' answers. Those are the bits worth doubling down on. The absences are just as telling.

If you're hiring right now, this is a low-cost change. No rubric overhaul. No new training. Just a shift of one question from minute two to minute fifty, and a small habit of writing down what the candidate says.

Where lemonly fits

We built lemonly because too much of the hiring process is spent on low-signal stages. Our candidate screening product handles the "did you do your homework" filter before the interview even starts – by scoring every applicant against your specific role criteria automatically. That way, by the time you're sitting down with someone, you can spend your scarce interview minutes on the questions that actually predict performance, rather than the ones that mostly confirm a candidate knows how to use a company website.

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Common objections, answered

Isn't "why do you want to work here?" a useful culture-fit check?

Not really – because the answers converge. Everyone who's prepared gives a similar three-part answer about mission, team, and growth. The question doesn't separate people on fit; it separates the prepared from the unprepared, which your CV screen has already done. If culture fit matters to you, ask behavioural questions about how the candidate actually operates – not how well they can recite your "About" page.

What if our mission is genuinely central – are we different?

Possibly. If you're a charity, a values-driven non-profit, or a cause-specific organisation where the mission is the product, then passionate alignment is a legitimate filter and the question becomes more useful. Even then, ask it with teeth – "what have you done in your own time that connects to this mission?" tells you far more than "why do you want to work here?".

Asked at the end, how do we score it?

Don't score it. That's the point. At the end of the process, the question shifts from candidate assessment to process diagnostic. The value is in what you learn about your own hiring experience, not in what it tells you about this individual candidate. Write the answers down, review them quarterly, and adjust accordingly.

We already ask "do you have any questions for us?" – isn't that the same thing?

They're related but not identical. The questions a candidate asks you reveal what they've researched and what they care about. The answer they give to "why do you want to work here?" at the end reveals what your process sold them on – which parts of the interview experience actually landed. Use both. They pull different signals.

Key takeaways

• "Why do you want to work here?" as an opening question is low-signal: candidates converge on the same rehearsed answers, because the prep is easy and the stakes are obvious.
• The two reasonable goals behind the question – checking research and mission alignment – are better served by other means: the candidate's own questions, and the inspiring effect of the process itself.
• 75% of candidates already research employer brand before applying, and only 9% of interview scores correlate with quality of hire – so spending opening minutes on this question is expensive.
• Candidate experience matters more than candidate enthusiasm: 66% of accepted offers are influenced by the recruitment experience and strong experience lifts quality of hire by up to 70%.
• Keep the question if you like – but move it to the end of the final interview, where it becomes a diagnostic of which parts of your process are winning great talent, not a low-signal quiz at the start.