It’s recruiting season on campus, and if you’re like many business school students, you’re about to find yourself overrun with cheese and canapé events hosted by an army of corporate recruiters.

After spending an afternoon at HBS doing a workshop for first-year students on perfecting their personal elevator pitches, I got some great questions from students about these recruiting events—what kinds of questions to ask, how to know if you’ve talked to long, how to start and end conversations, etc.

The first question is a great one: what kinds of questions should I ask if I’m just trying to learn about an industry and not necessarily sell myself?

The short answer is that you should never ask a question of a recruiter than you can find the answer to online.  It’s a waste of your time and theirs.  The goal is to show that you’re smart, intelligent and informed, not lazy (i.e. you didn’t do your homework ahead of time). 

So stay away from topics you can find online—like how big the company is, how many employees there are, whether or not they have factories abroad.   That kind of research should be done at home and ahead of time.

Equally important, stay away from macro-themes or big-picture questions that you don’t really care about and/or that the recruiter won’t know the answer to anyway.  For example, as an investment banker, I hated people asking me where I thought Goldman’s stock price was headed.  Or what I thought of the then-current trend of global commercial banks swallowing up smaller pure-play investment banks.  The truth was that I didn’t know and I didn’t really care.

I was an associate.  I cared about the deals I was working on.  As a health care banker, I was prepared to talk about my experience working with the pharma industry and managed care providers.  I was qualified to discuss my transition from government to Wall Street and talk to others about making a major career switch.  I could readily talk about getting up the learning curve quickly after never having been in finance before and I was always happy to answer questions about what life was really like inside 85 Broad Street.

The key is to keep it personal and keep it simple.  Ask about the recruiter’s experiences in their current role or when they were at a similar level to where you are now.  You’ll find people much more willing and able to engage in meaningful dialogue when you ask about personal experiences rather than lofty ideas that try to make you look smart.   Recruiters see through them in an instant.

Here are some additional examples of good questions to ask:

• What did you do before joining J&J?
• How did you find the transition from operations to management consulting?
• What are some of the interesting projects you’re working on right now?
• Was it challenging for you to join banking after not having a finance background?
• Do you have many people from the military in your firm? (if you’re in the military—don’t ask otherwise, it’s probably not relevant)
• What were some of the challenges you faced as a junior consultant at Deloitte?
• How do you find your interactions with senior management?