The No. 1 question this HR exec loves to ask in a job interview: It's ‘the most important thing'

CNBC

09-05-2025

When job candidates come in for an interview, chief leadership and human resources officer at professional services company Accenture Angela Beatty likes to see they've prepared.
Her No. 1 red flag is finding out they know nothing about the role they're interviewing for. You want to see that "they've thought about how they're going to be able to contribute," she says. Otherwise, it looks like they're "blanketly applying" to anything without caring much where they end up.
When it comes to green flags in a job interview, Beatty likes to see candidates' natural curiosity and hunger for knowledge. That's why the No. 1 question she likes to ask in an interview is, "what have you learned recently?"
Learning is key for growth in the workplace, especially at a time when so much of how work gets done is getting upended.
Generative AI is "sort of superpowering us as humans," says Beatty, adding that "it's hard to think of any job or place where we're not going to use it."
That's why being eager to learn is so critical.
People who continually want to learn can embrace the challenge of figuring out how this new tech works and become better both at using it and at what they do. The characteristic is indicative of potential success down the line as companies and industries adopt AI.
When Beatty asks people what they've learned, she's not looking for any specific arena in which their curiosity played out to see if they have this attribute.
It can be illustrated through courses taken in or outside the workplace, "it can be that I learned [data platforms] Snowflake or Databricks or prompt engineering," she says. "But it could also be that I'm learning how to cross-country ski."
The point is less to see how this characteristic plays out in the workplace and more to simply see if candidates "have that mindset about learning, that curiosity," she says.
In these everchanging times, a natural desire to gain new skills and knowledge is "the most important thing."