Ask about the other employees. Executives, middle-managers, future co-workers. What is their background? How long have they been working in their group? Do they

Ask about the other employees. Executives, middle-managers, future co-workers. What is their background? How long have they been working in their group? Do they have significant prior experience working in a position such as this? What is their day to day like? Ask to talk to people in the group you're going to be working in. What do they think of the company, their boss, team lead, other team members? Are they often asked to do more than should be expected of them? Do they love their position? If they don't offer or won't let you meet with the future team, this indicates they really don't care whether the team likes each other personally, OR that they're so busy they have no time to meet you - which is not good either. It should also be face to face; nobody gets to know someone over the phone. Finally, you can use probing questions to see how your future boss reacts. Make a joke and watch their body language. Ask them both professional and personal questions. Ask them how they would handle different work scenarios - would they throw a direct report under the bus, or try to cover for them? Do they micro-manage or are they hands-off? How responsive are they to communication, and in what forms? Do they work with many teams or just the one? Are they customer-focused or task-focused? Is their primary motivation to get ahead in the company, or merely to be helpful? Sometimes there's no way to know if a boss is going to be a jerk. But 9 times out of 10, either someone else working there has noticed it, or they'll act like a jerk to you with the right prompting.