An interview should be a conversation, shaped to each individual. The aim is to try to discover information about the person (and vice versa) gradually by follo

An interview should be a conversation, shaped to each individual. The aim is to try to discover information about the person (and vice versa) gradually by following threads of thought and argument in a properly developed context. The style of conversation, and the specific subject matter, should differ between individuals - it should be shaped to their context, and their responses should be shaped to your context, for it to be a valuable use of everyone's time. The moment you start to think in terms of 'sets of questions' or much worse 'best questions' to ask everyone and anyone who comes in for an interview, you've failed as an interviewer, in my opinion. This just gets more true as the questions become more generalised and abstract, which unfortunately they will tend to in order to filter up into a set of 'standard' or 'best' questions you'll find online. That's not to say you don't want topics or themes or ideas of questions to steer the conversation towards, and of course as with anything all the skill is in the delivery, but it's a fine line to walk and certainly thinking of an interview in terms of getting through a list of topics or questions is veering towards the wrong side of that line. It's tempting to pull questions from these lists, and just rap them off, because it's easy and you can convince yourself it's a good idea because a lot of them exist on the internet, so there seems to be some consensus that this is a good practice. I've done it myself in the past, and it was a mistake. It's lazy, it gives awful results, neither side of the interview will have a good experience or a genuine, valuable human interaction. It's not smart or a hack, just bad interviewing.