While your resume serves as the tool to get you an interview, you still have to perform above and beyond expectations during the interview to earn your coveted offer letter. Preparation is the key to your success and it is more than just reviewing the company’s Web site and the posted job description. You will need to have carefully planned answers to your hiring manager’s questions.
Interviews are fairly formulaic and will follow the same process. After you introduce yourself and get past the pleasantries, it is show time. Are you really prepared for the questions to come? Could you take any point in your resume and expand upon a situation where-in that was a major factor of your past performance?
We’ve compiled a list of questions that could possibly make an appearance at your upcoming interview. Take a moment to review them and see if you could easily answer each of these. The blanks would be information pertaining to either your background or something relevant to the position.
- What did you like least about your last job?
- What is your ideal company and work environment?
- What motivated you to get into ____?
- Why do you want this position?
- Could you tell me about your current role and the range of ____ activities that you do?
- How did you handle someone not pulling their weight during a project at ______ company?
- Tell me about a time you experienced a failure and what did you learn from it?
- Why do you think it matters whether or not a company does ____?
- Can you imagine a situation in a company where it would be best not to do any ____?
- When it comes to performance appraisals, what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) do you think are important for this ____ job?
- Tell me something about yourself that is not on your resume.
- What excites you about ____?
- Assume your performance is excellent at this position. Where would you like to see yourself in ____ in five years’ time?
- Name a job responsibility you didn’t like in your last position(s) and why.
- Tell me about skills or areas you want to improve upon in your ____ work?
- What are you looking for in terms on career development at this company?
- What would you say makes you stand out from all the other candidates for ____?
- Tell me about your favorite manager. Why was this person so memorable?
- What would you say are your 30, 60, and 90 day objectives if chosen for this position?
- What three character traits would you say describe you best?
- After reviewing our corporate information, what are a few things that we could do to improve?
- What was the most difficult decision you had to make in the last 2-3 years and how did you come to that decision?
- Say you had to write a weekly report to your manager about what you did in ____. What would you consider vital to include?
- What sort of challenges do you look forward to in ____, and why?
- Can you give an example or two of dealing with those challenges successfully?
- How do you see ____ working best with other departments in a business?
- Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager. How did you resolve the situation?
- What makes a good ____ person?
- Can you give some examples of what you’ve done in ____ that helped to protect or even grow your last employer’s reputation?
- Can you give me an example of ____ work that you did that you weren’t happy with – and why?
- What most attracts you to this ____ position?
- After reading the job description for this position, pick one activity to remove and one to add. Why did you choose those specific responsibilities?
- Tell us about a ____ project you did that you would do different now, if you had a chance?
- What type of work environment do you thrive in best?
- If you were interviewing someone for this position, name three things you would be looking for in a potential candidate?
- If we asked you to write ____ guidelines for all of employees, what would you include in them?
- If we looked at all of your social media accounts and everything you’d published publicly, would we find anything that would be embarrassing to you or to our company in the future?
- What drew you into this position and why?
- Could you prepare a budget for a ____?
- What elements go into planning a budget for a ____ campaign?
- How do you cope with stress and pressure in ____?
- Tell us how you use ____ in your own life, if at all?
- Have you used any monitoring tools or applications for doing ____? (If yes, give us your recommendations for them.)
- What companies do you think are top-tier and what do you admire about them?
- What do you think the secret of success is when doing ____?
- What other companies do you admire for the ____ work that they do?
- How do you see your job in ____ evolving over time?
- What ____ skills of yours do you feel are most underused right now and that you’d like to do more of in this job?
- Are you more of a leader or follower? Why?
- Imagine you were told by a senior member of management in our company to do something in ____ that you felt would be harmful to our reputation. What would you say to that manager to convince them not to do it?