I sat on the hiring side of these interviews for twenty years, and the pattern almost never changed. In nearly every physician's job search, there's a question the physician wants to ask and doesn't. Usually it's a good one, which is exactly the problem, because the good questions feel a little rude, so they never get asked. You're a guest, everyone's being nice, and pressing feels like you don't trust what's happening. So the question that would have told you the most is the one that stays in your head, and the politeness that stopped you is going to cost you for years.
I've come to think those unasked questions are the most valuable thing you're carrying into that room, and most physicians give them away for free.
Take the simplest one, which is why the job is open. It sounds too basic to bother with, which is part of why nobody asks it, but the answer, and even more the way it gets delivered, tells you a lot. Growth has a good sound to it. It's specific and a little proud, like a service line expanding or a partner retiring after thirty good years. Trouble sounds different, because it gets abstract, with lines like "we're always looking for great people" or "it was time for a change on both sides." When a straight question gets a soft, careful answer, you haven't hit a dead end. You've found the thing they were hoping you'd be too polite to push on.
Or try the one almost nobody asks, because it feels invasive, which is what happened to the person who had this job before you. You're not prying, you're reading the history. A role that has launched three physicians into good careers is telling you one story, and a role that has burned through three physicians in four years is telling you a very different one, and the difference is the next several years of your life that hang in the balance. The posting will never volunteer this, because it has no reason to, and you have every reason to ask.
My favorite, because it's hard to dodge, is some version of what a hard week looks like there. Anybody can describe a good week, since the good week is the brochure, so ask about the bad one and watch what happens. A healthy place will tell you honestly, because they've thought about it and they have answers, and that honesty is the reassurance. A struggling place will get vague or a little defensive, and either way you've just gotten your inspection report for free.
None of these questions are about money, and that's on purpose, because money is the one thing everyone's braced to negotiate, which makes it the safest and least revealing thing on the table. The questions that actually predict whether you'll be happy are about fit, and fit lives in the answers people would rather not give, like the call schedule, the coverage, the culture, and the reason the seat is empty. Those questions have a little edge to them, and the edge is why they work.
One physician got her whole read on a group from a single answer. She'd asked, lightly, whether people there actually used their vacation, and the recruiter laughed and said "the good ones find a way," and her stomach dropped, because she'd just been told, cheerfully, exactly what kind of place it was. She turned it down, and she still talks about that laugh.
The strange part is that you've spent a decade being trained to ask uncomfortable questions in order to get things right. You ask patients about symptoms they're embarrassed by, and you push a colleague on a diagnosis that doesn't sit well, and you are, professionally, one of the harder people in any room to satisfy. Then a hiring process is nice to you for three weeks, and all of that useful skepticism quietly steps aside.
Don't let it. Be as warm as you like while you do it, because warmth costs you nothing and it smooths the whole thing along. But ask the question you were about to swallow because it felt impolite. Politeness is a lovely quality in a dinner guest, and an expensive one in the biggest negotiation of your career, and you're the only person at that table who's going to pay for it.