Five ordinary questions. Five decisions.

The question is ordinary. The decision behind it is not.

A recruiter calls you about a role. They ask five completely ordinary questions.

What are you doing now? What is your stack? Why are you looking? What compensation do you expect? Tell me about your experience.

It sounds like information gathering. It is not.

Each answer is helping them make a different decision about you. And everything you say gets written down and passed on. The next person reads your recruiter's summary before they read your CV.

What are you doing now?

They are not asking for your job title. They are trying to place your level.

Compare:

"I'm a Senior iOS Engineer at X."

with:

"I work on the payments team. I own the checkout flow on iOS and recently led our migration to Swift concurrency."

One gives them a label. The other gives them scope.

What is your stack?

They are not asking how many technologies you know. They are checking whether they can map you to the role they are hiring for.

Do not give them your technical autobiography. Give them the technologies you could credibly be hired to use tomorrow.

Why are you looking?

They are not making conversation. They are checking whether this job can actually move you.

"I want something new" gives them nothing to match.

"I want more architectural ownership and a role where I can influence decisions beyond individual features" gives them a direction.

What compensation are you looking for?

They are not being nosy. They are checking whether you are affordable before anyone spends time on you. A number outside their band ends the process there, and you never hear why.

This is also the one question where improvising becomes expensive. Know three numbers before anyone calls:

The number you want. The number you would actually accept. The number below which you would walk away.

You do not need to disclose all three. You do need to know all three.

Tell me about your experience.

This is not only an experience question. It is a communication test.

Can you explain your career clearly to someone who has never seen your codebase?

Prepare the sixty-second version:

What you do now. What you are strongest at. What scope you have owned. What you want next.

Then say it out loud once.

The fix

Before your next recruiter call, prepare five answers. Not because the questions are difficult. Because the decisions behind them matter.

The recruiter may sound like they are collecting information.

They are deciding whether the next person should spend an hour talking to you.