So the best thing you can do is find out common interview questions, and answers recruiters look for. This article will serve as your cheat sheet for that. So, you can go into your next interview well-prepared.
Friday, November 04, 2016
How to Best Answer the 20 Most Common Interview Questions
So the best thing you can do is find out common interview questions, and answers recruiters look for. This article will serve as your cheat sheet for that. So, you can go into your next interview well-prepared.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
12 comments:
I have some reservations about some of the tips in the article. To begin, though I read the entire article, I don’t feel like I’ve gained any useful knowledge from it. Some parts of it were also oddly negative, such as the recommended response for question 10: What Was Your Salary in Your Last Job? The response from the article kind of assumes that the person it is giving advice to is a failure of sorts in life – why would the answerer have to deflect the answer? There is nothing wrong with talking about a salary he or she has, even if it’s not too great. Isn’t a low salary an excellent reason for wanting a better job? I always give my parents most of the money I earn, which is a huge motivating factor for me to want higher paying jobs. Interviewers are human – they should understand different desires in life, whether they be for family or personal reasons. A lot of the other points in this article are also pretty un-helpful apart from the fact that they offer readers potential questions they might receive. The title of the article is “How to Best Answer the 20 Most Common Interview Questions”, and yet each “best answer” is only about a sentence long that usually reiterates the question itself. Although the additional tip for Question 3 was very valid, it was the only one that existed throughout the article. I feel as though they could have done a lot more to explain good tips or alter the name of the article to simply state “Common Job Interview Questions and Answers” like the url does.
The major thing I disagree on in this article is that the typical list of questions that people will ask you can change from interview to interview. In my experience, when I was applying for colleges, no interview went the same and had all of these "typical" questions. While looking some of these up, which I did do at the time, did help with feeling prepared, they did not help me much in the interviews. Especially my interview with Carnegie Mellon. The questions that they asked were way more personal than anything I had ever been asked, so I was thrown off guard very quickly. Thankfully this was not my first interview, but I think I would have choked if I had gone in with a list of answers and none of the questions were asked. I do think it is important to set up fake interviews with people and see what different questions each person throws at you. Not only does this show how different each interview can be, but this also helps you get better at coming up with answers on the spot. This is something I definitely want more practice in. This article is helpful to some extent, but I do not think someone should let this be the end all, be all for interview expectations.
This questionnaire seems wildly surface level. It doesn't go into detail on how to make a question work for you or how to find a way to transfer certain facts about yourself across regardless of the questions. It also doesn't help for questions that make you blank, which in my experience are usually odd sorts, like what kind of super hero would you be and why. Yes I was asked that question while interviewing for a booth attendant position. I did around ten entry level interviews this past summer for odd jobs, soccer coach, bakery attendant, or daycare employee. All of which asked weirder questions than the last. If you really want to prepare answers then your better off practicing with more obscure questions seeing how, after a few interviews, questions like the ones in this articles list become almost second-nature. In my opinion its always better to prepare three selling points about your self you want to communicate during the interview and focus on bringing them up while answering the questions as smoothly as possible. But hey for a fifteen year old whos never interviewed before this might be a good start.
I really enjoyed the tips this article had to offer. One thing I found noteworthy overall was the blurb on the end: "It's not about you. It's about the company." For instance, last year, I was tasked with working to hire new faculty for my High School as we were expanding our Theatre Department. One of the biggest things that tended to shock candidates was that I would ask questions about the culture of our campus to see how much research they had done, and then asked how they would contribute to it--and better it. This tends to catch people off guard when it comes to interviewing simply for a faculty position at a High School, but it was very important to us as a school community to ensure we were offering the position to someone who was right for it. I really enjoyed the tips this article had to offer, but I do wish it went a bit more in depth. Some questions had good example scenarios, but others didn't and I felt that was a shortfall with this article.
I think this article presented helpful information for people who lack any basic interview skills. However, it did not cover anything more than that--basic skills. This article does include good ideas such as telling a story about yourself with a beginning, middle and end and describing what others think of you. Although, in the current job market, employers are starting to ask more unique/strange questions in order to get a more witty, thoughtful and intelligent employee. I believe it is more important to train yourself to be quick witted than to train yourself to memorize answers to the questions in this article. This article should've covered the What To Do's if your interviewer asks about your personal life, your favorite literature, etc, as it is more likely you will be asked these questions. Overall, although the article did contain some valuable information, it mostly provided very basic questions and answers without any nuance.
Looking over this list of questions just reminded me how much I hate interviews. Granted, I have some social anxiety so very few things are so nerve wrecking to me as one on one conversations with people I don’t know well: interviews, first dates, even doctor’s appointment make me super nervous. However, one piece of advice that this article offered that is really helpful to someone like me is remembering that an interview is not really about you. It’s about how you relate to the interests and goals of the company. So that when you are asked questions like “Tell me about yourself” which can feel open-ended and vague blackhole you have some structure to phrase your answer around. I’ve found that focusing on being pleasant and professional and then finding some meaningful connection between yourself and the company or the person interviewing you is the best way to conduct yourself during the interview process. And once an interview is over, don’t worry about it too much. You did the best you could and it probably went better than you thought.
I agree with most of these comments that the article is very basic, but I think it breaks down this information in a way that people who don't go to theater school might need to process the information. We (as artists) tend to accept information in a multitude of different mediums, and are able to synthesize it. Someone who is better as coding might not have that skill set, so this article may be better for them. What's also important about this article is that it breaks down what the employer is trying to get out of each and every question they ask. One of the scariest parts about interviewing is talking to the other person and trying to get a read on them, so having this decoding sequences could be helpful to some people who aren't good at reading social cues or body language. On a side note, you're not supposed to use more than 3 typefaces in anything you do, so this article gets a big fat F from me regarding that.
This article is so intro level that I'm not quite sure who it is trying to help. If it were going for those who had never or only rarely interviewed in the past, I would assume that it would gear its advise to working with little no no experience, but this article uses examples that would suggest a decent amount of previous experience. I also am not sure how much I agree with some of this advice. I have been part of a few group interviews, and you can always tell who read something like this in the 5 minutes before the interview started. It comes off as cookie-cutter and honestly a little boring. I am a big believer in the fact that an interview is as much determining if you're a good person and a good fit personality wise as it is about your resume. Yes, an interviewer wants to make sure you haven't made up the entire thing, but they also do want to get to know you, because most of the time, especially in customer service, they'll pick the friendly person with slightly less experience than the cocky one who thinks they've seen it all. Not addressing the importance of letting an interviewer get to know you as a person is, I think, the major downfall of this article.
I'm not sure if every advice in this article is useful or applicable, but there are some highlights that I took away. For instance, throughout the article the author repeatedly mentions how we should be careful and not talk about how the job benefits the our career, or how being a hard worker paid off in our career. Instead, we should use whatever about us that we're trying to sell and say how that's going to benefit the company. It's so important that the candidate tailor his or her answer to the company/organization's goals, since the interview is ultimately not about us - it's about whether we fit into the company/organization or not. Other than that, like some others have mentioned, the questions in this article were very generic and nothing really stood out. Also none of the advice were really creative or innovative, and I think giving creative answers can certainly help you stand out especially when the company is asking every single candidate these standard/basic questions, they'd probably get bored too.
While not directly related to theatre, since theatre interviews are very different, there is definitely some crossover with theatre and regular interviews, and I think this article was really informative on the best ways to approach some of these questions. To be honest, this article would have really helped me prepare for college interviews--for many of them, I had absolutely no idea how to respond or how the interviewer would react, and while I was easily able to talk about my portfolio and qualifications in that sense, I didn't think about being able to talk about myself, and often times I struggled with that in interviews. I hope that going into the future, this advice as well as the experience of college interviews and portfolio reviews will help me get better at discussing myself as a person. Overall, I thought the article was very informative and helped me get a grasp on what the interviewers are looking for in a candidate.
Ok let's start with the title of this article: "How to Best Answer the 20 Most Common Interview Questions." I'm getting really tired of these lists that will bring you success. You cannot succeed with a list. Period. I am waiting for the article that is literally one line: Be your damn self and answer the questions, and if the job is right for you, cross your fingers that you'll get it. No interview should be able to follow a cookie cut-out instruction guide. You should be able to have a conversation with a potential employer without referring to a list for your success, and if you can't do that, you probably can't do that good of a job with whatever you're applying for?
Oh Please. I don't agree with a lot of what this list is saying. There isn't a template on how to speak or answer questions. Like it just isn't possible. Everyone is so different in how they approach interviews and some get the job and some don't. I don't necessarily think it is because of the way the answer is given but also how the employer acts, how they think, previous experience, etc. I think lists like this just emphasize the idea that there should be a "system" we need to abide by. A system that makes people believe that by answering a certain way, they are not conducting themselves in the standards set by two guys in a suit.
Post a Comment