Here’s a different sort of question to try next time you find yourself in a second interview with a candidate of interest. It’s most effective if you use it about mid-way through the meeting, after you’ve covered some of the more “traditional” topics related to experience, background, and skills.

Lead into it by telling the individual that you’ve enjoyed learning about the jobs and people and events that have had an impact on how she got to where she is today professionally. But now you’d like to switch gears and hear a little about the things that have happened to her outside of work that she feels have influenced the person she is today. Then simply ask, “What were you like when you were a kid?”

Now, I know this may sound a little off-the-wall, and some of you may even be wondering, “What does this have to do with the job I’m hiring for?” But you can learn a lot about candidates based upon their answers, especially if you can get them to open up a little and share some personal stories.

Since most candidates aren’t expecting this question, they haven’t prepared a response ahead of time. So I find they tend to answer it pretty candidly and without trying to frame what they say around what they think you want to hear.

You might hear about interests they had (loved to build things, lived to play baseball, was a total bookworm), their personalities (shy, outgoing, troublemaker), and their lifestyles (moved around a lot, lived in a small town, was rich or poor).

They might share a little about their families (only child, one parent passed away when they were young, part of a close-knit extended clan) or about school experiences (straight A student, underachiever, loved math). They might talk about the challenges they faced, the dreams they had, or the people or events that they still think about to this day.

Who knows what you’ll hear? But managers who routinely ask this question often tell me that it always helps them learn something about their candidate they didn’t know. And often what they uncover gives them insight into the person’s character, views, and values that, as you may have discovered, can be very difficult things to assess during an interview.

There’s a reason childhood is often referred to as your “formative years.” Much of who you are is shaped by things that happen to you while you’re growing up. Those years aren’t definitive, of course, because you certainly find people who didn’t necessarily grow up under ideal conditions or influences yet go on to develop character and values quite different from those they were exposed to (and vice versa).

But one manager I know who never skips this question values it because he’s found one thing to almost always be true: If you want to know who people really are, you have to understand where they’ve been.

And that may be a history lesson you can’t afford to skip.

Janna Mansker is vice president of client services for Berke, a human resources consulting firm, where she leads the company’s education initiatives and advocates for clients. She can be reached at janna@berkegroup.com.