September 27, 2018

The Worst Interview Questions to Ask

Imagine you’re on a first date, and things are going pretty well. You feel the chemistry and are getting excited about a second date. Your partner stares deep into your eyes and asks, “Do you have any concerns about me that I can address?” or better yet, “How do I measure up against the other people you’ve met?” Lately, I’ve had several clients come to me asking if I recommend asking this question. My honest answer: It’s one of the worst interview questions to ask.

Interview questions to ask

The logic behind the question is that by asking it, you show the hiring manager that you’re open to feedback and it allows you to address any concerns that they have. Unfortunately, there’s a lot wrong here. First, asking a hiring manager if they have any concerns about you as a candidate, will more often than not, call attention to red flags that they may not have come to mind. You are literally asking them to think of your flaws, in an interview.

Your shortcomings are the last thing you want a hiring manager to focus on, especially at the end of an interview. Remember, once the conversation is over, they’re going to compare you to all of the other candidates, and if you leave them thinking about your concerns, that’s what is going to be freshest in their mind.

I’ve been in interviews where this question has been asked and it’s rarely gone well for the candidate. Most of those candidates didn’t end up getting the job. Putting the interviewer on the spot like that can make them uncomfortable and puts them in an awkward position. Often they are interviewing other candidates and still aren’t sure about who they’re going to hire. In an interview setting, hiring managers tend to be conflict-averse. They have a candidate slate of 5-6 people for this position, and rather than engage in an uncomfortable dialogue; it’s much easier for them to give a candidate a non-answer than provide critical or potentially negative feedback.

Interview Questions to Ask

Here’s my go-to list of interview questions to ask the hiring manager.

What are the next steps in the process? If they’ve already answered this during the interview, go ahead and skip this question.
What are the biggest challenges for this position? Show the hiring manager that you’re not afraid of a challenge, and ask about the problems early on in the question series.
What would success look like for me?/What would you like to see me accomplish in the first <time-period>? Helps the hiring manager visualize you being successful in the position
What do you enjoy the most about <the company/job/team/etc.>? End your question series on a high note. Remember, once you walk out of the room, they’re going to rate you. Keep it positive.

How to Get Interview Feedback:

Getting constructive feedback on your performance during an interview can be invaluable, and I completely understand that it’s hard to come by. While you might be tempted to ask the hiring manager in the interview, it’s not the time or the place. Instead, ask for feedback in your thank you note. By asking in a thank you note, you’re showing the hiring manager that you are open to feedback, but not putting them in an uncomfortable position.

Alternatively, if you are seeking honest, unbiased opinions on your interview performance, consider hiring an interview coach. We’ll partner with you and give you direct and immediate interview feedback you can use to improve your interviewing skills.

January 30, 2018January 30, 2018

Behavioral Interview Examples

Behavioral interview questions are prevalent in large organizations. Employers use them because there is a belief that past behaviors are strongly related to how people behave in the future. So if you were able to drive results in your last job, chances are you’ll do the same in the new position.

Today we’re looking at some of the top behavioral interview questions and how to answer them. These questions are all about storytelling using the STAR model. In all of your examples, it’s important to stay positive. Sometimes the questions can be tricky and occasionally phrased in a way that seems to encourage complaints. Don’t fall into the trap. When you talk poorly about your people in an interview, it’s a HUGE RED FLAG for the hiring managers.

Remember that behavioral interview questions are driving towards specific attributes and behaviors that the organization wants. If you could peek into the hiring manager’s interview packet, you’d usually see a rating scale and maybe even some descriptors on the targeted behaviors they want.

For example, If the hiring manager asks a question about teamwork the book might contain something like this:

1: Did not demonstrate the ability to work as a member of a team. Hostile, negative or unengaged. The employee did not complete the task.
3: Worked cooperatively as a team member. The task was completed and met expectations.
5: Went out-of-the-way to help ensure team success. Put the needs of the team before personal agendas. Exceeded business goals.

Tell me about a disagreement with a co-worker?

This question is used to gauge how well you can deal with other people. Ultimately, hiring managers are trying to make sure you’re not going to be toxic in the workplace. When you think about situations for these questions, try to come up with times where you were able to work out a conflict amicably, and you weren’t the one responsible for creating the conflict or issue.

In my last position, I was a part of a team working toward a significant, high visibility deliverable. There were four team members including myself, and we all had different responsibilities on the project. One of my jobs was to complete our weekly scorecard and report status to upper management. One member of my team was consistently late providing updates, and it was reflecting poorly on the entire team.

I took him aside and talked to him about the problem. Initially, he was upset that I approached him. First I explained to him my concerns about his work and how his delay impacted the deadline. Then, I asked him if he needed any help and if there was anything I could do. He said he had a lot of work on his plate and it was overloading him. We talked about different options and finally settled on one that would help us meet our deadlines and allow him to feel under less pressure. Ultimately, we were able to meet the deadlines, and the leadership was satisfied with the work the team completed. I also built a healthy working relationship with him.

Tell me about a time you were spread too thin?

Call it multi-tasking or juggling; most employers want to hear about how you can manage your time. These questions are looking for prioritization skills, knowing when to ask for help and being able to deliver on critical projects. One of the most common answers I hear in these examples is, “I worked a lot of overtime and got everything done.” While sometimes that’s the truth, it’s not the answer an employer wants to hear.

I was working on two special projects for different business partners in my last role when my boss stopped by my desk with an important assignment. The Director of our group needed some reports and analysis completed for a high-profile customer meeting scheduled for next week. I sat down with my manager to make sure I had a solid understanding of the new project requirements and estimated that the project was going to take about 20 hours of my time. Unfortunately, between the other two projects and my regular statement of work, it quickly became apparent that something was going to have to give. I reviewed the timelines of the projects

I went over the schedules of the projects and spoke to my business partners about their plans. We found about a week of flexibility in one of the projects, and I was able to adjust that schedule. The other big project was time sensitive and needed my attention. I proposed to my manager that this could be an opportunity for a junior employee to take over my daily duties so I could focus on the two big projects. She was supportive of the plan. I was able to bring the junior employee up to speed on the daily processes and remained available for questions during the week.

In the end, I finished the reports, my business partners were taken care of, and both the director and customer were thrilled with the analytics. The company was able to book $150,000 in additional revenue with the client.

Tell me about a time you had to deal with an upset client?

In any job where you’ll be dealing with customers, you can expect to get a behavioral question around customer satisfaction. If you come across this question and can’t think of a particular client example, take a broader view of what a customer is. Maybe you’re in a role that has internal customers. You can use that as the basis for a story too. Do your best to avoid stories where you weren’t able to resolve the concern or the client wasn’t happy.

I was an account manager for a business selling B2B services, and I had just taken over some new accounts. One day I received a call from an upset customer. He had made several requests to the previous account manager for changes to her account and had yet to see the updates take effect. I was still trying to build strong relationships with this client as the new account manager, but I wasn’t familiar with his concerns. First, I apologized to him for the oversight and told them I would look into it and get back to them later that day.

I put my other work aside for the day so that I could focus on this issue. When I started looking into it, I saw that the requests had been made, but weren’t input correctly. I spoke with engineering and asked if they could make these changes a priority. Fortunately, the changes were pretty simple, and engineering was able to implement the change that day. We worked together to re-run the reports for the customer and later that day when I called the customer back, I provided the updated data. In the end, the client was very satisfied with the results and how quickly I fixed the problem. The next month the client called me to add additional services to their account, generating more revenue for the organization.

Describe a complex issue you solved with a single solution?

In every job, you’re going to have to do some form of problem-solving. This question looks at your ability to think outside of the box to solve problems uniquely. One of the common pitfalls is when you don’t explain the why the problem was so complicated.

One of my first roles outside of college was to collect and input transactions from a team of 15 people. I was working with one other person, and 80% of our job was getting them into the system. The transactions came via email from all 15 people, and they usually didn’t have the information we needed. We were spending an enormous amount of time going back and forth and searching to find the information we needed. Since we both received the emails, we also ran the risk of duplicating the inputs in the system

After doing this for about two months, I realized that there had to be a better way to streamline these transactions. I met with my partner and our manager to propose a process improvement. I suggested that we develop a file which we could use to input and track the transactions. After I had received buy-in, I developed an Excel spreadsheet and programmed macros to automate some of the functions. The partners would input the info into the database and could check the status of their requests. Initially, I had some pushback from the team. A few team members were resistant, but once they saw how much more efficient it was, they came on board. This initiative reduced our time spent tracking down data so much that we were able to focus on different work. The organization similarly adopted the process as a best practice.

Behavioral Interview Questions: Summary

All of the questions you encounter on a behavioral interview drive towards a particular competency or behavior. If you pay close attention to the job descriptions and the company values, you can anticipate the subjects that they’ll ask you about during the interview and prepare examples for those areas. Provide specific examples and be clear about what role you took on in each story. Stay positive, even if it was a challenging situation and address issues diplomatically. Finally, practice your stories as much as you can!

If you found this information helpful, please share it! We’d love to hear from you, so please tell us what you think and or are any topics you’d like us to cover in future blog posts.

November 30, 2016August 19, 2016

Three Common Types of Interview Questions

There are three basic styles of interview questions used by HR and hiring managers. Today, we’re going to explain them so you can prepare for your upcoming interview. We’ll start with behavioral interview questions since they are the most common and then discuss traditional and structured questions as well. When scheduling your interview with a recruiter, HR or the hiring manager, there’s no harm in asking what category of interview questions that you should prepare for.

Behavioral Interview Questions

Behavioral interview questions are by far the most common types of questions asked during a non-technical job interview. These questions are asking for candidates to tell a story about something that has happened in the past. The reason these are so popular among HR is because studies have shown that the way people behave in previous situations is a really good indicator of how they are going to act in the future. Because these behavioral interview questions are so widely used, it is where we focus most of our interview coaching practice.

A few examples of behavioral interview questions:

Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with a co-worker.
Describe a complex problem that you fixed with a single solution.
Talk about a time when you had to work in close collaboration with someone whose personality was very different from yours.
Tell me about a time you had to juggle multiple competing deadlines? How did you prioritize them? What was the result?

Behavioral questions can be simple or contain multiple questions that you need to answer. Take notes on the question to make sure you hit all of the questions the interviewers are looking for and answer the questions completely. The STAR format is an excellent way to organize your response.

Structured Interview Questions

Structured questions are very similar to behavioral interview questions except they aren’t asking about past performance. These questions are more forward-looking and ask ‘what you would do’ instead of ‘what have you done.’ These are beneficial for entry-level positions and internships where people might not have as much background to draw from.

A few examples of structured interview questions:

How would you handle a situation where your supervisor asked you to do something unethical?
Imagine you are very busy with a large company project, and your manager asks you to take on additional, unrelated work. What would you do?
A furious client walks up to your desk. He believes that his being over-billed for services your company provided. After reviewing his information, you learn that the bill was, in fact, valid. How would you handle this situation?

Traditional Interview Questions

We call these the ‘mirror’ questions because they are the answers that candidates can rehearse in a mirror and fine tune their answers. These are pretty straight forward and easy to draft an answer. There isn’t any particular formula for responding to these questions. Traditional interview questions also don’t add a lot of value to the hiring managers, so we are seeing a lot less of them in the interview process.

A few examples of traditional interview questions:

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
What is your greatest strength/weakness?
Why do you want to work for this company?
Why do you want to be [insert job title]?
Tell me about yourself?

The one exception, is the ‘tell me about yourself’ question. In most interviews this question, in some variation is used to break the ice and move the discussion forward. Another variation of this question is ‘tell me about your work experience and education that has prepared you for this position.’ With few exceptions, we recommend that applicants focus on work history, education and any relevant training or experiences that relate to the job. This is not the time to talk about your love for the tuba, favorite cooking shows or your son in cub scouts, unless of course you’re interviewing for an orchestra, the food network or the forest service respectively.

November 30, 2016August 14, 2016

Interview Tip: How to be a STAR

The next time you find yourself in a behavioral interview, draw a little star across the top of your paper. No, I’m serious. STAR is my favorite acronym. It’s a formula for job applicants to use when they’re answering interview questions. STAR stands for Situation, Tasks, Actions & Results. It is well-known by Human Resources and hiring managers, but we’ve found that a lot of our clients haven’t heard of this interview tip before. Let’s break it down:

Situation

Anytime you are telling a story to someone; you have to give them a little bit of context, so they understand what’s going on. Imagine you’re telling your friend about an experience at a restaurant. If you dive into the conversation saying “The food was awesome, we had crab cakes and pasta.” Your friend is going to be caught pretty off guard. The same goes for an interview. The situation helps set the scene. Instead of jumping right into what you had for dinner, you should mention the restaurant name, when you went, who you were with and even a little bit of info on the restaurant.

It’s important to set the scene when answering interview questions, especially if you aren’t currently working at the company. Help the interviewers understand the circumstances surrounding your example and more context. Just recently I coached a client who was telling me about a story leading a team. The example was okay but not incredibly impressive. Once I started asking more questions, I learned his role, the team size, and the budget associated with it. These three things (Director, 150+ employees, and a lot of $) added significant weight to the example.

Tasks

The task is the assignment you are given. In most cases, the situation and task run pretty close together in your significant. In the restaurant example, the task becomes pretty simple, to eat food. However, maybe your friend wanted seafood, or you had to find a gluten-free restaurant that could accommodate dietary needs.

As an applicant, you want to be very clear and concise about what the assignment is. Share where the task came from (boss, owner, co-worker asking for help) and what it was. Explain the scale of the project – how big was the team, what was the timeline, what were some of the significant challenges that you needed to overcome. You want to help the interview panel understand the importance of the story.

Actions

The whole reason companies use behavioral interviews is that a person’s past behavior is a good indicator of how they will behave in a similar situation in the future. The actions in the STAR format are where you get to show the hiring manager that you are capable of handling workplace situations well.

Actions should be the bulk of your story. As a hiring manager, I want to hear about what YOU did. One of the biggest errors we see in interviews is people use “we” instead of I. While this is okay when you’re explaining to your friend about your dinner, “We ate crab cakes, pasta, and ice cream” it doesn’t play well during an interview. Instead, be very clear about your role and the process you took to solve the problem. Don’t get lost in the details and be specific about your role in each example. Hiring managers are looking to hear about your process and how you resolve the story.

Results

Results are where you get to shine. So many times people forget to discuss their results, and it hurts them in an interview. As a hiring manager, I try to ask probing questions in case the job applicant forgot, but usually, I won’t keep asking if they continue to leave out the results on more than one example.

The biggest interview tip on this topic is to avoid using a story that is currently in process. It’s incredibly hard to demonstrate results on a project that hasn’t finished, and hiring managers care about the results. They want to know if your actions were effective or not, and if not what you learned and how you would do it differently.

The next big thing to try to do is to quantify your results. A story is much stronger when you can prove it through numbers. Did sales go up by a certain percentage? Were you involved in increasing customer satisfaction? Did you reduce the number of hours it takes to perform the task? Sometimes it can be hard to put numbers to a story, especially if it’s been awhile since you were in the situation. Try your best to recall but don’t make the numbers up. Honesty is important, and hiring managers might use their networks to fact check your examples.

“What do you do if the outcome wasn’t good?” Proceed with caution. One example with a negative result isn’t necessarily going to hurt you in an interview. I only recommend using this type of story in a couple of situations.

You can explain that the adverse outcome was to no fault of your own
The question is about a time you failed/made a mistake etc
As a last resort, and you can’t come up with another example

In all of these situations, you need to be able to explain what you learned from the example and how you would do things differently.