Personality

How someone met the world, in the ordinary situations that revealed it.

9 questions. There is no order you have to follow.

• Do you get energy from people or from quiet and solitude?
• What do you do when you are under great pressure?
• When you need to make a big decision — how do you do it? By gut? By logic? By consulting others?
• Morning person or night owl? Tell me about a typical day's routine.
• What makes you laugh until you cry?
• What are you willing to fight for? What didn't you budge on even when pressured?
• What do you think people don't see about you at first glance?
• What are your quirks? Strange habits that people close to you know about?
• Do you see yourself as creative? What is your creative expression?

Using these

These work better asked about a real instance than in the abstract. Rather than whether they were organised, ask what their desk looked like: the answer tells you the same thing and comes with a picture.

Asking about someone, rather than asking them

If the person is not here to answer, the same question has to change shape. “Where did you grow up?” is a cruel thing to ask about someone who has died, so each question also has a second wording, for asking someone who knew them.

• Did they get energy from people or from quiet and solitude?
• What did they do when they were under great pressure?
• When they needed to make a big decision — how did they do it? By gut? By logic? By consulting others?
• Were they a morning person or a night owl? Describe their typical daily rhythm.
• What made them laugh until they cried?
• What were they willing to fight for? What didn't they budge on even when pressured?
• What do you think people didn't see about them at first glance?
• What were their quirks? Strange habits that people close to them knew about?
• Did they see themselves as creative? What was their creative expression?

The other themes

• Who they are: The questions that get past what someone did for a living.
• How they speak: Turns of phrase, filler words, how they open a conversation — the texture most interviews never ask about.
• Memories: Specific moments, not summaries of a decade.
• Relationships: The people who shaped them, and how they talked about them.
• Values and beliefs: What they thought was worth doing, and why.
• The harder questions: Failure, contradiction, regret. Ask these late, and only if you have earned them.
• Objects, songs and places: A photograph, a piece of music, a room — the fastest routes into a story.
• Everyday life: What an ordinary day actually looks like. The detail that vanishes first.