Interviews should always be a dialogue between people, and both sides should be prepared to answer each and every question. If you did an audit of all of the job search related tips and questions on the Web, one of the more common themes you’d likely find are how these writers insist on asking questions, often providing boilerplate samples of what to ask.

It’s an essential piece of the puzzle. You want your candidate to have a natural curiosity not only about the position itself, but maybe even the culture of the company, thoughts on industry trends, and other aspects that balance out a team. So, recognizing this, you should hope to have an understanding of anything they might ask — especially when it comes to how your company operates. When you conduct a technical interview with a software engineer, you should always remember that this is likely the place they’re going to ask the most questions about the team, projects, workload etc.

Additionally, you should always know your own strengths and weaknesses. Be honest to yourself and with your candidates. If you have 10 year-old legacy code written in PHP 4 — don’t hesitate to tell this to your candidates. After all, what reason could you possibly have to be disingenuous. That’s not something you want them discovering after the fact because the quick quit is far worse than the slow hire.

Many of our candidates have suffered through these kinds of bait and switches during the hiring process throughout their careers. It’s always a huge disappointment, and it’s always one of the first and biggest reasons they leave the job so quick. Even when we’ve asked our own candidates why they are looking to leave or have already left their last job, they give a number of different reasons, but more often than not we hear the common thread: “My expectations were never met.”

Easy, yet entirely generic suggestion to every hiring manager or team out there? Always set expectations at the very beginning. Do it clearly, definitively, and as truthfully and accurately as possible.

Measure thrice and cut once