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.

What to Bring to an Interview

January 30, 2018January 28, 2018

What to bring to an interview?

Do you ever wonder what to bring to an interview? It’s always pretty amazing to see what people show up with. I’ve had ringing cellphones, family photo albums, and even other people. Most HR and hiring managers have seen some rather odd things. Our interview coaching clients often ask us what to bring to their interviews.

Water: You’re going to do a lot of talking, and you will probably be thirsty. It’s nice to have a bottle on hand in case you get a dry cough and need to take a quick drink. Water is also a useful tool to help buy you a few extra seconds to think about a question before diving into an answer.

Resume: The hiring manager may not have printed it, or it could be a panel of interviewers who may or may not have seen a copy. I recommend bringing five copies with you to hand out if needed. Using a heavier weight neutral resume paper is a good idea, but not a deal breaker.

What to bring to an interview

Notepad and two pens: Write down the interviewer’s names or questions that come to mind. We recommend taking notes on complicated interview questions too so you can make sure you hit all of the sub-questions they might be asking. Bring two pens, because one might stop working, and try to avoid the ‘click’ pens if you tend to fidget.

Questions: Don’t get caught at the end of the interview without having questions ready to ask at the end of the interview. By asking well thought out questions, you can gain more insight into the job and build rapport with the interview panel. Research the company and prepare a few open-ended questions ahead of time.

Mints: Just to be on the safe side. Pop a mint while you wait in the lobby and then put them away. In case you’re wondering, it’s not a good idea to pull them out during the interview and offer them to the interviewers, no matter how much they might need one.

What not to bring to an interview

Almost more important than what to bring to an interview is what NOT to bring. The last list focused on being prepared for success while this is the list to avoid disasters.

What to bring to an interview

Cellphone: Please, just leave it behind. If you absolutely must have it with you, power it down as soon as you step into the lobby. Yes, turn it all the way off, not just airplane mode. The interview starts as soon as you walk in the door. Spend the time observing the office or reviewing your notes. Your body language directly impacts your confidence, so sit up straight instead of curling over a cellphone.

Other people: I’ve seen parents, boyfriends, and children at job interviews. While there have been circumstances where it’s okay, those are few and far between. If you need any accommodations to participate in the interview, let the hiring manager know before the interview. Otherwise, ask your friends and family to wait away from the office.

Chewing gum: I get it, you want your breath to be fresh, and you promise that you’ll spit it out before the interview starts. It’s still a bad idea, even in the lobby. The chewing, snapping, and popping can be distracting, and worse, you have to remember to find a place to get rid of it discreetly before the interview starts. Spit it out before you walk in the door.

Food: It is a terrible idea to bring your lunch with you and ask the interviewer if they are okay with you eating because you’re “starving!”. This one might hit a little close to home for me. Eating at an interview or in the lobby is a bad idea.

Perfume/Cologne/Scented lotion: There are a lot of people who have allergies to fragrances, and causing an allergic reaction during an interview does not lend to a positive first impression! Some workplaces are fragrance-free, especially in medical, office and retail environments. Scents can be too strong, and you want the hiring manager to focus on your skills, not smell.

November 30, 2016October 18, 2016

Resume Accomplishments

mona-lisa-leonardo-da-vinci-la-gioconda-oil-painting-40997 Leonardo da Vinci is the man responsible for the first resume, created over 500 years ago while he was seeking employment as a military engineer in Milan. A lot has changed from that da Vinci’s resume, and etiquette is always evolving. When I was in college, the career centers recommended using a resume to provide high-level information on job duties. They also said I needed an objective, but that’s no longer the case either. Most of the bullets on my first resume started with “responsible for” and went from there. Admittedly, that was over a decade ago. Nowadays, just listing job duties isn’t enough to get you hired. Hiring managers want more than what you did each day; they want you to tell them about what you were able to accomplish. Strong resume accomplishments will help you to stand out amongst the competition.

Show & Tell

Resumes are filled with buzzwords: team player, flexible, strong multitasker, great communicator, etc. While you probably have these skills using these words doesn’t help your resume. Buzzwords are general statements that don’t come with proof, and hiring managers tend to ignore them. Instead of using empty buzzwords, show employers that you have these skills through your accomplishments. While anyone can say that they’re a great multitasker, think about what you can put on your resume to prove it. There are three great ways to present resume accomplishments on a resume: numbers, annual goals, and awards & recognition.

Numbers

Numbers make your resume stronger. Take advantage of any chance you have to show your accomplishments with numbers. Using numbers is a lot easier if you work somewhere that tracks metrics and measures results. I know that it’s not always easy to measure your impact and sometimes it’s hard to remember the numbers that you influenced. These bullets will fall in one of three categories: dollars, percentages, or hours. Keep track of the number of team members, budgets and hours saved as you work on future projects so you can quickly update your resume later.

Managed all aspects of the $1.5M program budget including membership benefits, events, project development, and staffing.
Launched three successful campaigns in 2015 in new industries resulting in 150% grow
Developed a tool to update and track data entry transactions, saving 40 hours of weekly labor.

Annual Goals

Chances are you go through some goal setting at work each year. Goals are fantastic tools for resume writing so pull out your previous reviews and see what projects you were working and how you performed. These are the big-ticket items that you should include on your resume. As a project manager, your resume should highlight how you effectively led teams to deliver ahead of schedule, under budget or exceeding the requirements.

Led two teams through bi-yearly employee survey action planning, increasing survey response rates from 37% in 2009 to 68% in 2011.
Organized and oversaw a multi-day trade show for vendors in the food and beverage industry at the Hospitality Expo in Las Vegas.

Awards and Recognition

Awards or recognition make great resume accomplishments Any recognitions or awards are potential resume accomplishments. Since you are using your resume to highlight your achievements, awards and recognition are an excellent way to go about it. If the project is outside of your normal scope but matches a skill that the job is looking for, then it’s worth including. When you use your resume to highlight accomplishments you’re showing that you’re willing to go above and beyond.For my superstars out there who have lots of awards under your belt, be selective and choose the most impactful awards.

Recognized as Employee of the Quarter for organizing a community-wide food drive and overseeing 15 volunteers to advertise, collect and deliver non-perishable goods to the local food bank.
Selected as 1 of 12 Executive Advisors out of a class of 250 nationwide. Donated over 200 hours of management consulting to a student team over a three month period.

Functional Bullets

Sometimes it’s not possible to focus solely on resume accomplishments. Sometimes you need to demonstrate skills for the job, and you don’t have an achievement that relates. This is where the functional bullets come in handy. They focus on the general responsibilities of the job. A resume has limited space, so do your best to keep these items to a minimum. Don’t repeat them, and only list skills that you’re not able to cover in other areas.

Responsible for reporting and ensuring compliance with federal, state and local laws
Built and managed project schedules using both waterfall and agile methodology
Used HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS to design the internal company website.

Frequency of Updates

The good news is that resume updates get easier each time you do them. After awhile making updates becomes more about fine-tuning your resume. As your career grows, you want to revisit your resume every six months to a year, even if you’re not looking for a job. Set up a calendar reminder and set aside an hour or two to update your current job responsibilities. That way your accomplishments stay fresh, and you capture them before you forget. It’s okay if this version of your resume is long, you’ll be customizing it for each job you apply for in the future This just provides you with more material to choose from when you become an active job seeker.

Illegal Interview Questions

November 30, 2016August 25, 2016

Have shield-1020318 you ever been asked questions at a job interview that didn’t seem relevant or made you uncomfortable? Illegal interview questions are not job-related and target information about a job applicant that can be discriminatory. Generally speaking, HR teams do a lot of work to make sure that hiring managers don’t ask questions that are above boards, but these questions still get asked from time to time. As an applicant, encountering illegal interview questions should make you seriously consider if you want to work for that company.

One of my friends shared a situation where she was helping a team of managers does some significant hiring. She was the HR person partnering with a manager. They were interviewing their first female applicant when the hiring manager went off script and asked her if she had children. She told the interviewers, no, but the hiring manager continued down the path, telling the candidate that the position was for 2nd shift and that employees couldn’t leave work to go pick up their children. According to my friend, this hiring manager didn’t ask the male candidates the same question.

Fortunately, in this situation, everything worked out okay. The woman was very qualified for the position and ended up getting an offer from the company. As soon as the interview was over my friend reported the situation to the head of HR, who then removed the hiring manager from interviews until he was able to retake the interview training.

What are Illegal Interview Questions

The illegal interview questions below are off limit because they target information that is part of a protected class including gender, sexual orientation, national origin, race, religion, age, and disability. They are not job-related and will not help the hiring manager identify how you will perform.

Are you married?
Do you have children/want to have children?
How old are you/what year did you graduate?
What is your religious background?
Do you have a disability?
Do you have any arrest records?
Are you a union member?
Is English your first language?
Where are you (your parents) from?
Have you ever been hurt at work?
Do you have a car?
Do you own your home?

Hopefully, you don’t ever encounter any of these questions during an interview. If you do, there are a few ways that you can answer. First, it’s always okay to politely decline an illegal question. You could try: “I’m not sure I understand how this question relates to the Sales Manager position, can you please elaborate?” A more direct approach would be: “I am interested in this job, but I’m not comfortable answering that question at this time.” Yes, there is a chance that responding to a question like that could cost you a job offer, but ask yourself if that’s a company where you want to work in the first place.

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.