HRinmotion Blog – Career advice from HR Pros

This is one of those classic tough interview questions. Interviewers ask this question to see how you perform under pressure. Especially if the job involves potentially stressful situations, tough questions allow the interviewer to observe how you handle pressure. This question is also often used by those hiring for sales positions. The hiring manager wants to see how well you can “sell yourself”.

The Common Mistake

The most common mistake I have seen when this question is asked is the “throw everything and kitchen sink” method. This usually happens at the end of the interview, when the applicant is feeling unsure and not confident about the interview. As a last ditch effort, he or she tries to regurgitate the entire resume for me. The result? I couldn’t remember one point because I was too overwhelmed with too much information. And the candidate came across as desperate, and that is the worst mistake you can make.

How to Handle This Question

This is where doing your homework pays. Do your homework and learn the top 3 to 5 requirements of the job. If you know the main requirements of the job posting, you can link them with your qualifications. That will allow you to prepare a 20-second commercial containing 2 to 4 points that will reinforce the message that you are the one to hire.

As mentioned, it’s important that you choose the main requirements, since every employer has a “wish list” requirements, you don’t need to speak to all of them. Speak to the main requirements, the ones you feel are high priorities based on the nature of the work.

A 20 second commercial that links your strengths to the employers top 3 to 5 requirements will ensure you leave a lasting impression that you are definitely the one to hire.

This post will focus on the panel job interview.  A typical panel style job interview consists of two or more job interviewers conducting the interview.  Panel interviews are implemented by companies to reduce the bias that can come from having only one person conduct the interview.  Also sometimes the hiring manager invites members from the work group to conduct the interview to ensure a candidate who can fit is selected.  Regardless of the reasoning behind the panel interview, here are some tips for your panel interview.

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In this post, we are going to provide some tips when it comes to asking questions in job interviews.  Asking questions shows your interest, intellect and helps build rapport with the hiring manager.  Asking the right question at the right time can help you seal the deal for the job opportunity.  However, if done improperly questions can have the opposite effect.  I can recall instances when a strong candidate was bypassed due to the poor use of questions.  Below are some tips and examples of qood questions to ask in your next interview.

Wait for the Right Time and Come Prepared:

It is important to ask the interviewer questions when it is appropriate.  In most interviews, the hiring manager sets some time aside at the end of the interview for you to ask some questions.  This is when you should be prepared to ask some well thought out questions.  I advise candidates to prepare a list of questions to ask that they can pull out.  Preparing a list of questions ensures you do not forget under the pressure of an interview.  Trust me, I have seen many candidates who freeze and “blank out” due to nerves.  Also by pulling out a list of questions, you impress the hiring manager by showing him/her that you have actually taken the time out to thoughtfully write down your questions.  This shows heart, real interest and depending on your questions can show your intelligence.

Now, good interviewers understand that an interview is a two-way street.  Experienced interviewers understand the value in giving candidates ample time to ask questions about the job, company and so forth.  Good interviewers recognize the big decision a candidate makes when considering joining their company.  But not all interviewers were made equal.  So before the interview begins let the interviewer know you have some questions and ask him/her when a good time is to cover these question.  Or if the interview ends before your questions are answered make arrangements with the interviewer to follow up.

Good Questions to Ask

As mentioned, a good question should show your interest, intelligence and help you build rapport with the interviewer.  Here is a list of qood questions to ask in your next interview.

What are the current challenges that face the department?

What are the immediate top priorities of this position?

What are the long-term objectives for this position?

How would success look like for this position?

What is your ideal candidate?

Describe a typical day in the office.

Can you describe the work environment for this position?

Describe the work culture and philosophy of the organization.

How did you get into your field?

What attracted you to this employer?

What do you like best an least about working this employer?

What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of this employer?

What are the next steps in terms of time lines and process for filling this position?

Assuming I was successful in this posting, can you tell me more about who I will be working with/for?

What is the management style of my manager/upper management?

What do you see as the greatest opportunities for improvement in this area that I hope to join?

What challenges might I face in carrying out my responsibilities for this position?

Can you tell me more about my direct reports?

For more information, practical tips and advice to be successful on your next job interview check out the links below.

In this post, we want to share with you some classic job interview questions.  Whether you are interviewed by a more traditional hiring manager or a hip young recruiter, the questions below are the favourites of many staffing professionals.

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Common Job Interview Questions

What do you look for in a manager?

How would your employees describe your management style?

Tell me about yourself.  Describe yourself.

Thinking back to your previous job, what did you like best and least about your position?

List 5 qualities required to be successful in this position.  Which one are you the weakest in?

What are you looking for in your next position?

Where do you see yourself in 3 to 5years?

Why should we hire you for this position?

What have you done to prepare yourself for this role?

Tell me about one of the best teams you have been a part of.  What made this team experience so special for you?

This job can be stressful at times, how do you manage stress?

Tell me about your greatest workplace success.  Why did you choose this example?

Tell me about a time when you made a mistake at work. How did you handle it?

What is your proudest career achievement and why?

Tell me about the most stressful situation you have been in.  How did you handle it?  What did you learn about yourself?

Tell me about a time when you had to deliver a difficult message to a person or group of people.  What made the communication difficult?

How does this opportunity fit into your career goals?

What is the greatest challenge you have had to overcome in your career?

How your colleagues describe you?  How would your manager describe you?

What strengths do you bring to this position?

We don’t always get along with everyone we work with.  Tell me about a time when you had to work with someone who you didn’t see eye to eye with.

More Job Interview Information

For more information on job interview tips browse through our blog posts, read our articles and see our courses.

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In this weeks 24 hour newspaper article submission – Uncover your greatest weakness, HRinmotion looks at one of many techniques job seekers can use to overcome the difficult interview question “What is your greatest weakness?”. From our experience, this question is one of the most challenging for job seekers when asked in a job interview.

We hope you enjoy the article above.  For information on resume job interviewing and resume writing you can take courses to do it yourself or hire a professional service.

Take our interactive online course and ace your next interview!

Hire a personal job interview coach and learn from HR professionals

So your resume has been short-listed and you have been asked for an interview.  So all is going well except during the interview, you are asked one of those difficult questions.

Here is another one of those classic tough job interview questions that HR asks to determine if you are within their price range and to gain an advantage in negotiations.  Questions about expected salary are not easy to answer but below are a few quick tips to help you handle these types of situations.

If you are asked about your salary expectations, try to deflect or delay the question. You can respond by saying that you need to find out more details about the responsibilities.  A salary or wage is really just the price the employer pays for a certain set of job responsibilities performed, so before you can respond with what salary you expect, you need to have a solid understanding of the job.  Personally, I think this is one of those out-dated job interview questions that some HR and hiring managers use to get leverage.  Having been in HR and compensation, my opinion on this job interview question is firstly that compensation is a complicated specialization within HR.  So no candidate can be expected to provide an accurate and meaningful answer.  As such, I cannot see any other reason for an employer to ask this question except for getting the candidate to “reveal their cards” first.

Second, the process for employment is such that the employer is expected to make a job offer IF they feel the candidate is a right fit.  That is you as the candidate will jump through the hoops until the employer is satisfied and determines they want you, at such time it is they who are responsible to make an offer.  Anyway, as you can see this job interview question is a personal pet peeve of mine.

So what are other options of answering this question?  Well, in keeping with the fact that it is the employer’s job to make an offer if they want to hire you, you can say that you will be prepared to discuss salary when an offer is made.  Yet, another approach is to shift the question back to the interviewer by asking the salary range of the position, and then indicate if it’s in your desired range.

Above all, if you are to respond to this question, do not answer by giving a specific number but instead, provide a salary range.  In other words, try not to be too specific.   Instead, respond with a phrases like, ”in the range of…”.

So what if you are the chosen one and the employer makes a job offer?  How should you evaluate the compensation?  Well, evaluating the compensation is just one component of evaluating a job offer.  Remember, compensation should be seen with a broad view.  By this I mean, the salary is just one component of compensation.  Variable pay, benefits, and other perks (for example, education support, and so forth) make up a job’s total compensation.  Evaluating a new job offer requires you to consider other things like career growth, stability, location and so forth in addition to remuneration.

Take our interactive online course and ace your next interview!

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Recently a friend called me for HR advice.  Apparently he interviewed for an acting/relief management job after many years on the front line with several commendations but was bypassed.  He was still in the union and the acting management job was still a union job (like many union shops the acting management is a interim management job.  It allows unionized staff to try out the managment role without leaving the union).

After our discussion, it was revealed that the reason he was bypassed was due to a poor interview. The feedback given by HR was that specifically in the interview when the candidate falied to answer the behavioral questions.  When he was asked to give an example when he displayed a certain behavior, he responded by using “we”.  As such the interviewer and hiring manager was not clear no what the candidate’s role was in the situaiton.

In my years of interviewing candidates, I have seen first hand many candidates trying to look like a team players by using the word “we”. While this works in everyday conversation, it does not serve you well in interviews.  The reason is that when you use the word “we”, the hiring manager does not know what your role was in a situation.  For example, the inteviewer asks to “tell me about a time when you resolved conflict with a client?”  and you respond, “we had a big client …..we had to do this and that ….we ended up saving the account…..” and so forth.  In this example, you can see how it is virtually impossible for the HR and the hiring manager to determine what the candidate’s role was.

In an interview, it is your chance to shine, so use the word “I”.  Anyway this is interview basics and is covered in our interview course.

For more see our online job interview and resume writing courses. So until our next post, we wish you much luck and success in your career search.

Take our interactive online course and ace your next interview!

Hire a personal job interview coach and learn from HR professionals

Behavioral Questions and Soft Skills

When we coach our job interview clients, we focus on behavioral interview questions that assess the essential soft skills a job through its core functions. Let’s break this down, when we say soft skills we mean we focus on the soft skills because we have found that most candidates handle the questions designed to assess their technical proficiency very well only to stumble with the questions designed to assess their soft skills. For example, when we ask a programmer to explain what a certain set of code means or how best to handle a coding issue, most often their answer is a good one. Now when we ask the same candidate to “describe a time when you did not get along well with a co-worker and how you handled it” to assess their interpersonal skills, 9 times out of 10 they stumble. We see the same thing over and over again whether we are hiring for an accountant, teacher, and so on. Most candidates can handle questions designed to assess their technical competencies much much better than questions designed to assess their soft skills.

Why does soft skills matter? Because 9 times out of 10 applicants are bypassed due to their soft skills. We hear this all the time when we debrief with the hiring manager to get their feedback on the applicant. Sometimes, the hiring managers will directly state that the applicant lacked the soft skills but more often it will be phrased as “no connection with the applicant”, or “didn’t get a good feel about the applicant” or “don’t think the applicant would fit in well” and so on.

In addition to focusing on the soft skills the key is to focus on answering behavioral questions designed to assess soft skills through core job competencies. Behavioral based interview questions because they are very prevalent in the HR industry. Behavioral questions focus on assessing past behavior by asking you to provide an example or describe a situation that has happened in the past and what you did. So because of the reasons stated and others beyond the scope of this post, you will likely be asked these questions in your next job interview.  So for example, suppose you are interviewing for an accounting job.  The key soft skill in this job is attention to detail.  To assess this soft skill most effectively, employers will use a behavioral question to assess your attention to detail but they will do so through a core job function.  A core job function of an accounting job is to balance the general ledger.  Now when you blend the two concepts together, (assessing a core soft skill with a core job function), you get a question like “tell me about a time when you noticed a detail that was overlooked by others when balancing the general ledger”.

As a job seeker, it is wise to prepare yourself so that you can answer interview questions that asses your soft skills through the core job functions that are on the job description.

How to Answer

Now that we talked about what kinds of questions you should expect in your job interview, how should you answer?  Your response really depends on exactly the type of interview question asked. While interviewing skills as a hiring manager or job applicant can be quite an in depth topic and beyond the scope of this post, we have provided a quick lesson on how you can improve your interview skills. We have chosen to briefly cover the behavioral question because this is where we see most people struggle.

To ensure that you provide good answers consistently we advise that you follow a structured approach when responding to behavioral type questions. Two effective techniques to use are “STAR” (situation, task, action, result) and “PAR” (problem, action, result). These techniques are very similar to one another, so for illustrative purposes, we will discuss the STAR method.

To use the STAR technique, simply describe each element in your interview answer. So with the star technique, begin by describing the situation. Here you want to quickly give context to the interviewer (where, when, etc). Next clearly describe your task, that is what were you tasked to do in this situation. Now it is time to describe the steps or action you took to complete your task. Lastly, describe the results that you achieved. Sounds simple right? Well it is simple, but the secret is to practice responding following this structure. By following structure, you will ensure that you provide complete answers and do not omit vital pieces of information. For more information see our articles and courses on interviewing skills.

The Questions Are In Your Resume

Remember that another good source of job interview questions is your resume. Hiring managers will ask you questions based on your resume. For some people it’s hard to recall what you did last week, let alone what you did at work a few years ago. So it pays to review your resume before you go to your job interview.

For more see our online job interview and resume writing courses. So until our next post, we wish you much luck and success in your career search.

If you would like to see job interview questions for other positions, just let us know by leaving a comment here or contact us directly by email. If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe by email or RSS feed.

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Recently a prospective professional firefighter from Vancouver, BC contacted me for some job interview coaching. As many times as I do this, it still never ceases to amaze me how ill prepared most candidates are for interviews. I suppose that’s why they have contacted me, as such perhaps I have a biased sample. On other hand, I saw the exact same thing when I was in corporate HR interviewing job seekers regardless of the position they were interviewing for. When it comes to job interviewing, it seems many candidates are not aware of their opportunity for improvement, for more details see my post titled, unskilled and unaware.

Anyway, we go over the firefighter job interview questions I have developed and accumulated over time in our mock interview session. While this candidate was definitely not weak, this candidate was definitely not stellar or strong. Below, are the highlights of what I observed in this coaching session. The mistakes I saw were ones I have seen repeated time and time again in interviews. Doing quite well with the technical questions but stumbling with very basic questions, shows that the candidate did not fully prepare for the interview.

“If you were ordered to ventilate a roof, how would you do this and what layers you would see as you cut through”

For example, when I asked him “how to ventilate a roof and what layers you would see as you cut through” , he answered perfectly. But when I asked this prospective firefighter, “Why do you want to serve this fire department? ” The answer he provided was ok and was really focused on him and why he wanted to serve this city. However, he did not mention anything about the department. And most importantly, he did not tie his reason into the job requirements. For example,

“I really like the cultural diversity of this city and would like the opportunity to serve it’s many different citizens. For example, I understand we have a large Chinese community here as such I have started a conversational Chinese class and would welcome the chance to use it.”

Or

“I want to serve this department because of it’s commitment innovation. I understand this was the first department in the province to implement thermal imaging technology to aid in search and rescue. The other reason is due to it’s fine reputation. My friend John works at hall 6 and has nothing but positive things to say about the department.”

While the truth may be that he just got out of fire academy would work for the first department who offered, you may not want to mention that. What the employer is looking for here is not a confession of desperation but evidence that you have thought this out and researched this. They have many applicants to choose from and wants to be sure that you have thought this out and you have done your homework.

“Why do you want to serve this fire department? “

So if you are asked this question, do some research on the department and provide some reason why you want to work for this fire department. Use the internet and research the department that you are interviewing with. You can be sure that this question will be asked.

The other area for improvement was what he has done since graduating from fire academy to help him succeed in this role. Basically he did very little and could not even articulate a good answer. I have written a post on this very topic of what to do while waiting for firefighter job openings, so make sure you check it out for more information. Anyway, we decided that one way he can improve his answer was to at the very least describe what he has done to maintain the skills he learned in firefighting academy. It would have been ideal if he had taken classes like scuba, climbing, or even a conversational language to help him better serve the community. At the end, we settled on things like keeping fit, tying knots, first aid, and so on.

Anyway, I just thought I would share my observations from this firefighter job interview coaching session I recently completed with you. Until our next post, we wish you much luck and success with your career goals.

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Have you ever been in a job interview where you freeze up when asked if you have any questions? If you have, you are not alone. Being on the other side as a job interviewer, we have seen many experienced and highly qualified candidates respond with a surprising “no” or frantic head shake. To the job interviewer no questions can lead to a negative impression and show’s the candidate isn’t excited or enthusiastic to know more about the position or the company. Job interviewers think, “why wouldn’t you want to have a chance to interview us?” . Some of the best and most memorable conversations arise from these questions. We like being asked questions and reversing roles since it does become boring being the one asking all the questions. Come on give us your best questions and leave an impression. Even if you have one question…its better then nothing at all.

Here is an article that lists a few questions you may want to consider asking in a job interview.

For more see our online job interview and resume writing courses. So until our next post, we wish you much luck and success in your career search.

Take our interactive online course and ace your next interview!

Hire a personal job interview coach and learn from HR professionals