Ask HN: Why do recruiters ask why are you looking for a new position

in case you stupidly say you hate your coworkers or something similarly bad

Entrapment.

Probably to weed out people whose answer would be things like "I was fired."

They want to see if you are looking for professional growth, stable salary, or if you are a toxic moron who will start badmouthing their former colleagues which will indicate that you will do the same with your future ones. The last option is end of story, the first two will let them decide if you are a match for the position or you will leave in a few months and they will have to repeat the exercise.

One thing that your answer to that question may indicate is whether you are thinking long term or thinking short term. Neither is absolutely good or absolutely bad. If they are looking for someone who will stay 5+ years and climb the ladder and so on and you answer "money" or "bored", then you probably won't be a good fit. If they are looking for cannon fodder, then there is no point mentioning "a need to grow" or anything similar.

Some may just be ticking a box, and as others have said, almost any answer is fine unless its some overly negative reason that raises red flags.

A good recruiter would also ask to help you find the right job. If you're leaving your current job, presumably there is something you're looking for that isn't happening, and its important to know what that is so your new job is actually better than the previous one.

They're looking for red flags. If they ask you and your response is along the lines of, "I Hate my manager, she's such a bi*&^", that's a red flag.

The good ones don't.

Maybe it’s a way to start the conversation and find out a bit about what you're currently doing and what you want from your next role. But I still hate answering it myself.

It's a really good open ended question, and, it's a directly related to the motivations for joining the company.

A lot of them use it as an ice-breaker, to start the conversation off and get you comfortable with talking about yourself so they can understand you and your profile better. They also use it to check for red flags as mentioned by other comments.

The correct answer to this question, assuming you're employed, is "I'm pretty happy at <company>, it's a good environment and I really like the team. I'm not really looking for a new challenge right now, but if the right opportunity presented itself, I'd be open to it."

It helps establish their psychological ascendancy by forcing you to give up private information.

Also to be sure you won't do something really stupid, like getting a job without their help.

There are a few categories of job hunters:

- itching for something new

- can't stick around because of personality clashes

- compensation

- not looking, but "looking"

Folks who're looking for something new will likely only stick around a couple years, because then "new" will be "old", and they'll want something "new" again

Personality clashes - whether their "fault" or not need to be seen early: doesn't make them [inherently] "good" or "bad" candidates, but since personality fit is >90% of every job ... you need to grok this fast

Money/perks/work-life balance/PTO/stock options/etc all matter to everyone - but how much they matter varies person to person

If they're content where they are, but are willing to talk to you, you know you have to work harder to get them - and it's probably not going to be by merely tossing a few $$KK at them

The way you (or any other candidate) answers, "why are you looking for a new position" indicates worlds about them as a candidate, and how well that particular recruiter is going to be able to place them into the company portfolio he/she works with

There are a lot of negatively slanted replies in this thread who sound oblivious to how hiring works or sound like people who have justifiably been passed over. Even the phrasing of "what answers are they looking for?" sounds a little like you're viewing this as someone you're going up against, or intrusive questioning, or just hoop to jump through just to earn a paycheck instead of a conversation that could have benefits for you.

Is salary alignment your only metric for accepting a job? Of course not. It goes the other direction too. Recruiters and hiring managers also don't just want someone who just matches the salary range, they want the best possible fit from the pool of candidates available to them. Even when it comes to money, some salary ranges are hard limits, others might be flexible for the right candidate. The recruiter probably knows which employer is which. Yes, obviously recruiters are not 100% vested in your career or becoming your buddy but they are financially motivated to be a decent match maker and you should hold the conversation in good faith (they don't get paid in full if you don't work out). Think of a job match as a radar chart, not just salary demand on a one dimension number line.

Not having something thoughtful to say in response to these types of questions probably just means you're going to get tossed over to seat-filler jobs and not places willing to pay a premium for perfect fits because you're not giving them anything to work with. Trust me when I say that experienced recruiters have met all sorts and you have nothing novel or surprising to say in these early stage questions, even the average ones will figure you out pretty quickly.

I'm figuring out if we're both right for each other. For example, if they voice some problems with their current/previous employment conditions or workplace and we have the same problems, asking this question helps me tell them right there and then that we also do have these problems and shortcomings and what we specifically are doing to address them, or not, and why. I also want to know what they're looking forward to, what they like, what they want to do to tell them if they will find it with us, or not, or not right now but it's on the roadmap, or not at all, and why.

It enables me to give them a better picture of what the work and environment are, to be completely transparent about our shortcomings so they don't feel tricked because something was important to them but I didn't consider it that important or have even thought of it. It also enables me to learn: maybe we're doing something that irks people, maybe we're doing something good; they're not working at the company yet and they can go on about things that drove them nuts or hindered their work or well-being. It is a scenario where I will be responsible for these people, their growth, their livelihoods, their well-being, and I don't want to fuck it up because I didn't get or give enough information.

As of today, someone we're hiring and I had an interview. They'll be relocating to another country and I wanted to make sure that the payment situation is figured-out before they go abroad, so they don't get stranded without means just because we overlooked some detail (someone from the company talked with the bank, and our accounting firm while the person was interviewing with us, and we had a call with the accounting firm to know what the options were. We want things to go smoothly, and want our people to have the best work environment we can provide). They asked if we're willing to pay for coworking space, we had never done it, I asked how much, then agreed to it.

We're a tiny, learning organization, and one of the things we did in 2019 was push for remote work because our colleagues were spending up to 6 hours per day in commute, which is just insane. One of the main reasons we built our platform is precisely to enable people to work on ML products from anywhere, and we experimented systematically because "some day, we'll be forced to do that and we'll have to hire someone working in another country so we might as well learn the lessons when the stakes are low, right now".

I push them to ask all kinds of questions about everything: compensation, equity, product, strategy, what everyone's role is, risk, revenue, customers, clients, stack, how we conduct meetings, how we build product, what the work will be, what parts of the things they didn't like in their previous employer are present in our company, anything goes.

I want them to have as faithful a picture as possible giving them all the information so they make better decisions.

because they want to find a way to hire you for peanuts

Not a recruiter, but recruiting.

_Why_ you're leaving your last position is a really good indicator of a lot of things

* Are you leaving for money? if so, will you leave us for more money?

* Are you leaving because you don't feel challenged? What is that challenge you're looking for? What do you want to learn with us?

* Are you leaving for workplace/culture reasons? How has that affected you and how did you try to work through it (ie how good are your conflict resolution/communication skills), how you speak about those challenges is also ... illuminating

* Do you not feel like you're listened to/participating? How have you tried to resolve that before looking to move on?

There's lots of reasons, but for me it's mostly about how you answer, not what you answer.

The obvious answer is a 5-10% salary increment. That's a red flag because it takes a very long time for someone to become useful, even a senior. You don't want to invest in someone who just leaves 8 months later for a slightly higher salary.

If we were offering a 30% increment or something that's stupid to turn down, that's not so bad.

The other thing is gauging culture fit. Are you looking for growth? Well, this is a write hacky stuff based off designs so you're not going to be happy here.

Are you moving closer to home? Why pick us when we're the same distance?

Do you think your previous job has no financial security? We should probably let you know that we only have 11 months runway.

If you say you are looking for a role where you manage people you are not a fit for my team because we need ICs.

If you say you’re looking for meaning in your life, I can ask you what that is to you and then share what we are (HFT) and you may decide that we can provide meaning or not.

If you’re looking to work on an exciting new stack or technology, I will be able to tell you about where we sit there (not exciting).

If you want to look for a remote role, we’re not for you.

So on and so forth. There are a million reasons why someone might be looking for a job. When I’m hiring for my team I want to make sure you’ll be happy here and be useful. It’s demoralizing to the team to have people join and then leave shortly after.