Have an interview coming up?
The best thing that you can do to prepare is to think through the questions you’re likely to be asked and formulate answers ahead of time.
Here are the 10 most common interview questions and how to craft a strong answer to each.
It’s important to remember that every interview is a two-way street. You should be interviewing the employer just as much as they’re interviewing you because you both need to walk away convinced that the job would be a great fit.
So, when the tables are turned and the interviewer asks, “Do you have any questions for me?” take advantage of this opportunity. It’s the best way to determine if you’d be happy working for this employer, and whether your goals are aligned with theirs.
A Glassdoor study of tens of thousands of interviews found the 50 questions you’re most likely to be asked in your next interview:
While not the most common interview question, the failure question — should you get it — is rather perplexing. How do you answer this honestly while also not scaring away your potential future employer by bringing up that time you fat-fingered a trade and lost the company a lot of money?
It’s a tricky situation to be in. You want to impress, but you’re explicitly being asked to talk about something you failed at. So, what do you do?
“So, what questions do you have for us?”
It’s the inevitable question that comes at the end of nearly every job interview — and yet it’s the one question job seekers rarely have prepared an answer to. And when people do think to prepare for this part of the interview, they often ask bland stock questions that aren’t truly important to their job hunt.
People get so hung up on preparing for the question they might get asked that they often forget to answer important questions they should have and need answers to.
Unfortunately, in a down economy, job hunters tend to adopt a scarcity mindset. If you need work, you may not be able to afford to be picky about which offer you accept, but that doesn’t mean you have to approach the interview from that frame of mind.
Rather, if you ask questions as though you are weighing the offer of this job against other offers (whether you are or not) you’ll be in a better position to know if the job is a good fit for you and how you can best succeed with the company.
Remember: The power in these situations is with the listener, so you can end on a powerful note by asking thoughtful, insightful questions that not only make the interviewer think, but give you answers you need to make a choice about whether or not to accept the job.
Here are my top five:
Want to ace your next job interview? It’s not just about doing the right things. What you don’t do can be just as crucial to getting hired.
In particular, don’t do any of these things:
Having a ton of experience under your belt doesn’t necessarily mean you have an “impressive” resume.
“You can have all the experience in the world — but if your resume doesn’t stand out, if you don’t present that information in a well-organized manner, or if it doesn’t tell your story, nobody will take the time to look at your resume closely enough to see all that experience,” says Amanda Augustine, a career expert at TheLadders, an online job-matching service for professionals.
To get a clearer picture of what makes a resume stand out, we asked Augustine to create a sample of an excellent one for a mid-level professional.
There’s a scene in the 2013 movie “The Internship” where the two laid-off sales guys (played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson) are asked one of those legendary Google brain teaser interview questions.
The question was: You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
Some job interviewers ask tough questions to trip you up or to get you to reveal information you may be trying to conceal. Others want to get a better sense of your thought process or see how you respond under pressure.
Whatever the reason, you’ll want to be prepared.
How many times have you applied for a job and never heard back? You tell yourself, “They probably never saw it,” or, “Maybe I just wasn’t a good fit,” and you move on.
But, more likely, your resume just didn’t impress.
Copyright 2015 © New Ventures Consulting | All Rights Reserved