TRAPS: Beware; about 80% of all interviews begin with this “innocent” question. Many candidates, unprepared for the question often dont have much to say or if they have thats almost irrelevant.Here the interviewer basically see the communication and clarity of thoughts.
BEST ANSWER: Start with the present and tell why you are well qualified for the position. Remember that the key to all successful interviewing is to match your qualifications to what the interviewer is looking for. In other words you must sell what the buyer is buying.
Question 2 : What are your greatest strengths?
TRAPS: Dont boast of you.Try to list your qualities in orderly manner. You don't want to come across as egotistical or arrogant. Neither is this a time to be humble.
BEST ANSWER: You know that your key strategy is to first uncover your interviewer's greatest wants and needs before you answer questions. And from Question 1, you know how to do this. Prior to any interview, you should have a list mentally prepared of your greatest strengths. You should also have, a specific example or two, which illustrates each strength, an example chosen from your most recent and most impressive achievements.
Question 3:What are your greatest weaknesses?
TRAPS: Beware - this is an eliminator question, designed to shorten the candidate list. Any admission of a weakness or fault will earn you an “A” for honesty, but an “F” for the interview.
PASSABLE ANSWER: Disguise a strength as a weakness.
Example: “I sometimes push my people too hard. I like to work with a sense of urgency and everyone is not always on the same wavelength.”
Drawback: This strategy is better than admitting a flaw, but it's so widely used, it is transparent to any experienced interviewer.
BEST ANSWER: (and another reason it's so important to get a thorough description of your interviewer's needs before you answer questions): Assure the interviewer.. that you can think of nothing that would stand in the way of your performing in this position with excellence. Then, quickly review you strongest qualifications.
Question 4 :Tell me about something you did – or failed to do – that you now feel a little ashamed of.
TRAPS: There are some questions your interviewer has no business asking, and this is one. But while you may feel like answering, “none of your business,” naturally you can’t. Some interviewers ask this question on the chance you admit to something, but if not, at least they’ll see how you think on your feet.
Some unprepared candidates,express regrets regarding a parent, friend, etc. All such answers can be disastrous.
BEST ANSWER: As with faults and weaknesses, never confess a regret.
Best strategy: Say you harbor no regrets, then add a principle or habit you practice regularly for healthy human relations. (funny? :-)
Question 5 : Why should I hire you?
TRAPS: Believe it or not, this is a killer question because so many candidates are unprepared for it. If you stammer or do hmm hmm umm then god bless you.
BEST ANSWER: By now you can see how critical it is to apply the overall strategy of uncovering the employer’s needs before you answer questions. If you know the employer’s greatest needs and desires, this question will give you a big leg up over other candidates because you will give him better reasons for hiring you than anyone else is likely to…reasons tied directly to his needs.
Question 6: Where do you see yourself five years from now?
TRAPS: One reason interviewers ask this question is to see if you’re settling for this position, using it merely as a stopover until something better comes along. Or they could be trying to gauge your level of ambition.
BEST ANSWER: Reassure your interviewer that you’re looking to make a long-term commitment…that this position entails exactly what you’re looking to do and what you do extremely well. As for your future, you believe that if you perform each job at hand with excellence, future opportunities will take care of themselves.
Question 7: Why do you want to work at our company?
TRAPS: This question tests whether you’ve done any homework about the firm. If you haven’t, you lose. If you have, you win big.
BEST ANSWER: This question is your opportunity to hit the ball out of the park, thanks to the in-depth research you should do before any interview.Best sources for researching your target company: annual reports, the corporate newsletter, contacts you know at the company or its suppliers, advertisements, articles about the company in the trade press.
Question 8 :Tell me about a situation when your work was criticized.
TRAPS: This is a tough question because it’s a more clever and subtle way to get you to admit to a weakness. You can’t dodge it by pretending you’ve never been criticized. Everybody has been. Yet it can be quite damaging to start admitting potential faults and failures that you’d just as soon leave buried.This question is also intended to probe how well you accept criticism and direction.
BEST ANSWERS: Begin by emphasizing the extremely positive feedback you’ve gotten throughout your career
(ofcourse academic) that your performance reviews have been uniformly excellent.Of course, no one is perfect and you always welcome suggestions on how to improve your performance.
Question 9: Why aren’t you earning more money at this stage of your career?
TRAPS: You don’t want to give the impression that money is not important to you, yet you want to explain why your salary may be a little below industry standards.
BEST ANSWER: You like to make money, but other factors are even more important.
Example: “Making money is very important to me, and one reason I’m here is because I’m looking to make more. Throughout my career, what’s been even more important to me is doing work I really like to do at the kind of company I like and respect.
Question 10 Are you willing to relocate or travel?
TRAPS: Answer with a flat “no” and you may slam the door shut on this opportunity. But what if you’d really prefer not to relocate or travel, yet wouldn’t want to lose the job offer over it?
BEST ANSWER: There are two ways to handle it:
1.Keep your options open and your reservations to yourself in the early going, by saying, “no problem”. You strategy here is to get the best offer you can, then make a judgment whether it’s worth it to you to relocate or travel.
Also, by the time the offer comes through, you may have other offers and can make a more informed decision. Why kill of this opportunity before it has chance to blossom into something really special? And if you’re a little more desperate three months from now, you might wish you hadn’t slammed the door on relocating or traveling.
2.The second way to handle this question is to voice a reservation, but assert that you’d be open to relocating (or traveling) for the right opportunity.
The answering strategy you choose depends on how eager you are for the job. If you want to take no chances, choose the first approach.If you want to play a little harder-to-get in hopes of generating a more enticing offer, choose the second.
Disclosures:Some of the content have been compiled from the Internet.