Interview questions and answers
Compelling Accomplishment Stories
Questions to Ask
Here you’ll find a compilation of 20 common interview questions. Plan to prepare responses to at least one in each category.
| Your experience/qualifications | |
|---|---|
| Question | Tip |
| Why are you the best candidate for this job? | For all of these questions, choose examples that relate to the job description and what they are looking for, taking care to emphasize your sincere interest in the opportunity. |
| What are your strengths? | |
| What would your references say about you? | |
| What would your direct reports say about you? | |
| Tell me about an accomplishment you are most proud of. | |
| Give an example of a time when you went above and beyond the requirements for a project. | |
| Your career goals | |
|---|---|
| Question | Tip |
| Why are you interested in working for our company? | Do your research and say something specific about their company that is different from other companies. |
| Where do you see yourself in five years? | If there is the potential for career advancement at this job, you can express an interest in growing within the company. It’s ok to say that you’re not sure about your career path at this time but it can be helpful to express your top interests and how the opportunity is aligned with them. |
| Personality/relationships | |
|---|---|
| Question | Tip |
| Why are you interested in this job? | Relate your answers to the job – keep focused on how you can help them, not on how the job can help you. |
| What motivates you? | |
| Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a coworker – what was it and how did you resolve it? | Do not blame the coworker! Focus on your ability to work collaboratively to resolve difficult situations in a positive, professional way. |
| How do you handle pressure? | Discuss work-appropriate stress management techniques. |
| What are you looking for in a supervisor? | Discuss the ways that a supervisor can support you to perform your best |
| Difficult questions | |
|---|---|
| Question | Tip |
| What are your weaknesses? | Talk about a real weakness or mistake that you worked on and improved over time. Just make sure it’s not one that will eliminate you from consideration for the job! |
| Tell me about a time you made a mistake. | |
| Why do you want to leave your current job? | Be very careful here! Do not ever criticize your previous boss or company. Keep it positive and talk about why you want to work at their company, or move up in your career. |
| Why is there a gap in your employment history? | Be honest but no need to be detailed. Reasons such as education, travel, and family are perfectly acceptable. Whatever the reason, keep the response positive and forward-looking. |
| Logistics | |
|---|---|
| Question | Tip |
| What are your salary requirements? | Do your research in advance to make sure that you are within their range and not over or under-selling yourself. If it’s early in the interview process, salary questions are a little tricky because ideally you’d wait until they really want you before you start talking numbers. You can state a range rather than a number to start off with. Also, it may not work, but you can try to stall the question, saying something like “This opportunity seems really interesting and I’d love to figure out if I’m a good fit first.” |
| Are you willing to travel? | If the job requires travel and you know that, the correct answer is yes. Some people respond by saying what percentage of time they are willing to travel. |
| What’s your availability? | Think about this in advance and have an answer ready – how much notice would you need to give your current job? Do you have any trips or vacations planned for the next 2 months? If so let them know now. |
Compelling Accomplishment Stories
A story highlighting teamwork
In my last job, a cross-functional team including me were preparing to launch a new product. We met early on to clarify our objectives and timeline, and what our roles and responsibilities would be. However, during the project, it became apparent that people were being pulled in different directions, and we were getting behind schedule. At that point I talked to my colleagues and got their support for scheduling a short check-in meeting every week to see where we were at. We took turns facilitating the meeting so that each person had responsibility for keeping things on track. Having those meetings renewed everyone’s commitment to the project and ensured that we all had an equal stake in its success, and we were able to get it done on time – and under budget.
A story highlighting problem-solving
In my last job, I was responsible for our overall social media strategy. However, a number of different staff (including some senior level executives) had access to the accounts, and sometimes posted updates that had typos, or didn’t fit in with our overall brand messaging. I talked to some colleagues at other organizations who said they had overcome this issue by requiring people to have their posts reviewed by someone from the communications team in advance, but I knew that wouldn’t work with my organization’s culture. Instead, we set up a rotating schedule so that one of our team (me and two assistants) was responsible for checking all of our feeds once an hour to make sure that anything got posted was on-message and accurate, and make any necessary corrections. That solved the problem and kept us from adding another layer of bureaucracy.
A story highlighting resourcefulness
Recently I volunteered for a community organization that does tax preparation for low income people. Because it was a new service in our area, we were having trouble getting the word out to people that it was available. I had the idea of reaching out to our local association of churches and letting them know about the opportunity, so that they could put it in their newsletters and announce it at services. I helped create a one page flyer that could be posted at each church, and raised the funds to do a mailing. This dramatically increased our number of participants, and allowed us to have a much bigger impact on the community.
A story highlighting attention to detail
In a previous position I was given the responsibility for updating a spreadsheet that projected our future health benefit costs for the coming year, based on health care plan and family size. After a month or two, I noticed that the allocations for two staff members who have similar family sizes looked different from one another, so I went back and checked all of the formulas, and found an error in the legacy spreadsheet that caused us to underestimate our total annual costs by 10%. I was able to discover this in time for us to make adjustments to our budget so that the final result did not have a serious impact on the organization.
Questions to Ask
Here are some examples of questions you can have ready for the end of an interview when the interviewer asks what questions you have.
- Is this a new position? Has it been open long?
- How will you evaluate success in this position?
- What are usually the most challenging aspects of the job?
- What are the priorities for this position in the first 2-3 months? The next year?
- Who will be my supervisor?
- Could you describe the team I’ll be working with?
- How would you describe the culture of the office?
- What do you like about working here?
- How would you describe your perfect candidate for this job?
- What’s the normal path for advancement within the company?
- At what point would you expect me to be ‘up to speed’ with the duties of the job?
- What are the company/organization’s goals for the next year?
- What is your timeline for hiring?
- What question haven’t I asked but should in order to best understand the role?
- Do you have any concerns about my fit for the position that I can address now?