Most job interview questions for academic jobs are pretty open-ended. (It's not a quiz. Your general/oral exams for the PhD are a quiz!)

When I give interviews, the questions are almost always along the lines of:

• Tell us some more about your research that you've done and the future direction you see it going in

• Tell us about your teaching

• Tell us about why you actually think this is a job you'd want to have

• Tell us about your attitudes towards public outreach in history

• What questions do you have for us? (Which is trickier and more important than it sounds! If they have no questions, or their questions do not indicate an investment of time and interest, then that is a bad sign. Their questions for us are typically very revealing. We had one candidate ages ago whose questions revealed very clearly that they did not want to work here.)

And we might follow-up on any of the answers they give with follow-up questions. The goal here isn't to ask questions that we have "right" answers to, or to trip them up at all, but to use these questions to get a sense of them beyond what we get in the written application materials (which includes a CV and so on), their research talk (which goes into detail on some aspect of their work), and their informal meetings they have with us through the day (at lunch, etc.).

Our experience is that this kind of questioning helps fill out one part of understanding of them as a scholar and a teacher, and also helps us understand their level of interest in the job (you might think that lack of enthusiasm was not a problem in such a tight job market, but you'd be wrong — there are plenty of people who want a job but who are only lukewarm about our specific job, and we want someone, ideally, who has a realistically grounded sense of why they want this job).

Note that my list above is more or less the type of thing we ask for any discipline I might interview for — not just history.

(I honestly don't remember what I was asked in my own interview. Definitely a "describe your work/describe your teaching" sort of set of questions were part of it, but I don't remember the rest.)