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Successful job interviews revolve around a coherent set of questions that assess talent and accomplishment, examine judgment and values, consider success and failure, sample personality, and explore compatibility. Some of the questions are straightforward. Those are the fastballs. They come right across the plate and ask directly about previous experience or skills. Others are more unpredictable. They are the curveballs. They can come out of nowhere and test your reflexes and imagination. They may ask about something seemingly unrelated or frivolous. Either way, when you hit one out of the park, everyone cheers.
The first rule of the job interview: Don’t wing it. Preparation pays. Know what you’re talking about and to whom. Know as much as possible about the job. Have a list of questions on a pad and in your head. Think about where you’re going in the conversation, what you want to find out, and how you want to get there. Just as you wouldn’t sail across the Atlantic without GPS, you don’t approach a job interview without strategy and structure. You are not sitting down for a random chat. You are trying to learn as much about the other person as you can to establish whether this position is fit for both of you.
If you’re the applicant, you can anticipate that most every interview will ask you touchstone questions about your background, your professional experience, your interests, and what you bring to the table.
Why are you interested in this position?
What do you think you can do for us?
What makes you qualified and unique?
Why should we hire you?
Prepare a series of responses for each question. Organize your thoughts in bullet points, two or three distinct characteristics for each response, so you can talk about several traits without getting lost or long-winded. Practice your answers. You want to be clear and concise, prepared to address the question—or a variation of it—directly and confidently. Think of some examples or short stories that highlight relevant experience or set you apart. If you led a group of people to China to study architectural design and energy efficiency, you can talk about the new materials and technologies you saw and the discussion you had about China’s changing culture of innovation. If you ran a summer camp and had to deal with screaming kids and demanding parents, you can talk about the lessons of human nature that you so ably put to use to keep everyone happy.
Keep in mind that to the astute interviewer, your tone will convey as much about you as the words you use, so strike a balance in how you present yourself. Talk about your successes without bragging, express confidence without sounding cocky, acknowledge your shortcomings without sounding insecure. Be prepared to speak about your character and personality by citing a tough decision or a dilemma you faced and how you worked your way through it. Know what questions you want to ask. The questions that you, the candidate, will ask are nearly as important as your answers to the interviewer’s questions. You need to project informed curiosity about the position, the enterprise, the competitive landscape, and the measures of success.
You’ve been hiring a lot of people lately. What’s driving your growth?
How has your digital strategy affected your retail strategy?
How do your employees translate the corporate social responsibility you promote into their own work lives?
How are you doing with your questions and your answers? The best way to know is to listen to yourself. So try practicing by recording your answers on your smartphone. Do one answer at a time. Take it from someone who has done TV all his life—watching and listening to yourself is a sobering experience! You’ll be your harshest critic, but the experience will allow you to modulate your voice and fine-tune your answers so you project confidence and fluency.
If you’re the interviewer, you hope your candidates have practiced their responses. You want them to impress you, to talk about their strengths and why they’re the perfect fit for the job you’re filling. So you have to ask precisely and persistently to get beyond the résumé and practiced responses. Tailor the questions to the candidate and the job. If you’re filling a management position, ask about how your applicant deals with people, motivates success, and handles setbacks. If the job requires physical endurance, ask about similar work the candidate has done and how he stayed healthy. You are asking questions that call for tangible answers that shed light on your applicant’s talent, experience, and personality. You want to get a sense of what will motivate her and keep her productive. You ask about situations or experiences that illuminate intangible characteristics, such as how the person deals with adversity or thinks creatively. You want insight into the other person’s work ethic and professional expectations, goals, and ambitions.
What’s the most successful project you’ve run?
What is it about this job that interests you most?
How does this job connect with your larger professional aspirations?
Both the interviewer and the interviewee have an interest in clarifying the expectations of the workplace and establishing the qualities that each party brings to the relationship. Both try to dig out information by using direct lines of inquiry and by listening to words and tone. Both are asking themselves:
Will this be a good fit?
Do our skills and interests align?
Do we want the same things?
Are we compatible?
Job interview questions that look for compatibility come in some basic shapes and sizes. They ask you to:
Introduce yourself. These questions ask who you are, what you’ve accomplished, what you’ve learned. They ask about background and qualifications, where you’ve been, and where you’re going. They reveal what makes you unique.
Share your vision. Imagine that you are already on the job and part of the team. Take a situation, an opportunity, or a crisis and say how you would meet it. What risks would you take? Apply your past experience and knowledge to the new and imagined challenge.
Acknowledge setbacks and challenges. These questions go to the hard things in life—the really tough decisions, the failures, and the conflicts. This line of inquiry explores the human story and the adversity that calls for ingenuity, fortitude, and resilience.
Swing at the curveball. Think fast! These out-of-the blue questions test spontaneity and creative thought. They push people out of their prepared responses to get to the unvarnished and the genuine. Be creative. Be genuine. Have some fun.
Hunting the Best Heads
To get an inside perspective on the questions that job interviewers value most, I called Shelly Storbeck, managing partner of Storbeck/Pimentel and Associates, an executive search firm that specializes in higher education and nonprofit recruitment. I’d met Shelly years before when I was a candidate in a search. She is a keen judge of character and a realist about what it takes to be a leader in academia, where every stakeholder needs to be heard. Change is difficult when tenured faculty, defiant students, helicopter parents, and tradition-loving alumni have a say. There can be as many constituencies on campus as there are in a good-sized city.