Interview prep · Hiring chair
What you can and cannot ask
The fear of saying the wrong thing is fixable in twenty minutes. This is the twenty minutes.
Interviewer fear does real damage: it produces short, shallow interviews that fail the candidate and the company at the same time. The rules are learnable, and once learned they free you to have a real conversation. Drill the instinct: for each question, would you ask it, as worded, before an offer? (Rules as of August 2026. This is general information for interview preparation, not legal advice, and your employment counsel owns your actual policy.)
Drill one: “'Can you perform the essential functions of this job, with or without a reasonable accommodation?'”
Correct. This is the lawful frame, verbatim, and it works for every candidate, not only candidates with visible disabilities. Pair it with a written list of the job's actual essential functions and you have a defensible, useful interview question.
It is the question the ADA built for exactly this purpose. Avoiding it usually means improvising something worse. What you may not ask before an offer is whether someone has a disability, a diagnosis, a medication, or a treatment history. Ability to perform essential functions, with or without accommodation, is squarely lawful.
Drill two: “'Have you ever been arrested?'”
Correct. An arrest is an accusation that may have gone nowhere, and the EEOC's position is that arrest records alone do not establish conduct and their use carries disparate-impact risk. Conviction questions, asked consistently and weighed through individualized assessment, are the defensible territory. In Indiana there is no statewide law delaying the conviction question for private employers, but when you ask matters less than how you use the answer.
More information is not better when you cannot lawfully act on it. An arrest that produced no conviction tells you someone was once accused, and building any part of a decision on it invites exactly the challenge you fear. Convictions, job-related, individually assessed. That is the lane.
Drill three: “'Are you in treatment or recovery for drug or alcohol addiction?'”
Correct. A person in recovery, including someone taking prescribed treatment medication such as buprenorphine, methadone, or naltrexone, is protected under the ADA, and treatment questions are disability inquiries you may not make before an offer (EEOC, 2020). You may lawfully ask about current illegal drug use, and you may drug test under a consistent policy, with results routed through a medical review officer. And if your policy automatically fails anyone on prescribed treatment medication, that policy is the single most common way well-meaning employers end up in exactly the case they feared. Fix it before it fires.
Safety is managed through fitness-for-duty standards, consistent testing policy, and the medical review process, not through recovery interrogation. Someone stable in recovery who answers honestly gets punished for the honesty, and someone who lies sails through, so the question does not even buy the safety it promises.
Drill four: “'What type of discharge did you receive from the military?'”
Discharge-type questions carry risk because discharge status can correlate with protected disability, and the information is rarely job-necessary. 'Tell me about your service and what you were responsible for' gets you everything useful. Also retire any deployment-and-mental-health questions permanently: assuming service means damage is a stereotype with legal consequences, and veterans hear the assumption instantly.
The honoring is real and the question is still the wrong tool. If a specific clearance or certification is a genuine job requirement, ask about that requirement directly. The full picture you actually need is what they did, what they led, and what they can do for you, and those questions are all safely and fully askable.
Now you, out loud
Rewrite your interview guide's riskiest question using the pattern from these drills: job requirement, directly asked, same wording for every candidate.
One way it can sound
“Instead of anything touching history, diagnosis, or status: 'This role requires lifting fifty pounds, a forklift certification within 90 days, and reliable Tuesday through Saturday attendance. Walk me through how that fits for you.'”
Say it to the mirror, a friend, or the wall. Nothing here records, transmits, or stores anything. That is a promise built into how this site works.
Keep these
- Job requirement, directly asked, identical wording for everyone. That pattern is your safety and their fair shot.
- Convictions yes with assessment, arrests no. Functions yes, diagnoses no. Service yes, discharge and deployment-health no.
- The interviewer who knows the rails asks better questions and runs longer, fairer, more useful interviews.