A resume tells you what someone claims to have done. A short set of screening questions, asked the same way every time, tells you how they actually think about the work. These forty questions are grouped by what they reveal, so you can build a screen around the signal you actually need instead of a generic list.

Group questions by what they test, not by topic

Most screening lists are organized by role or by function, which makes it easy to ask questions that all test the same thing twice. Instead, group them by what they reveal: technical depth, ownership, communication under pressure, and judgment when the instructions are unclear. A strong forty-question bank usually splits close to evenly across those four groups.

What a strong answer sounds like

The best screening questions have a recognizable shape to a good answer: a specific situation, a decision the candidate made, and a result they can quantify or explain clearly. Vague answers that stay at the level of “we worked as a team” are the clearest signal to dig deeper with a follow-up, whether that follow-up comes from a recruiter or an AI interviewer.

Reuse the same bank, tune the follow-ups

The questions themselves can stay largely fixed across a role for months. What should change from candidate to candidate is the follow-up: asking about the specific project on their resume, not a hypothetical. That’s the difference between a screening call that confirms a resume and one that tests it.