It took me a while to get that interviewers aren’t really looking for honesty when they ask stuff like “why do you want to work here?”

I mean maybe they are, but they’re gonna be very unhappy with the most-honest answer from 95+% of candidates for the vast majority of employers and jobs.

So of course, you’re supposed to be… quite a bit less honest. And I guess maybe there’s some value in filtering out people who don’t get that? Or who refuse to “play ball” on principle? IDK the reasons, I didn’t make the rules.

I was raised with and internalized honesty as very important, and adjusting to an adult world (mostly—almost entirely, actually—the business world) in which that needed to be judiciously tempered and certain kinds of dishonesty were expected and failure to play along punished, was quite a damn shock. I adjusted eventually but I’ve never really been happy about it.

What they're usually asking for is "why do you want to work here instead of somewhere else, if they offered you a similar position".

I ask why people want to work here (or similarly “what do you want from your next position”) as a basic check of whether their and my motivations are aligned and how strong their motivation might be. Sure people can lie, but it also helps clarify if you both have the same ideas about what the role involves short or medium term.

There is not a right answer, but there are some wrong ones that indicate a disconnect that do come up sometimes.