Interviews 

job-interview.net provides the following tips regarding job interviews and interview questions.  For more information, review the Complete Interview Guide.

The interview is about you and how you qualify for the job.  Remember your other job interviews?  How many of the questions were about you and your work history?

Review your resume or application.  Better yet, if you know someone who’s hired employees or if you have a job placement counselor, have him or her review your resume.  Look at your resume critically.  Place yourself in the interviewer’s shoes and note any problem areas or questions that you think the interviewer employer would ask.  Start with the most recent problems.  Problems areas may include: gaps in employment, terminations, job-hopping, significant differences in education versus work history, education and grades.

How many questions were you asked on your previous interviews?  Most job seekers will have 6 to 18 questions on the interview.  How do you know what the interviewers will ask?

You can find out what the interviewers may be thinking.  Each job announcement or job advertisement may include any combination of a description of the job, job applicant qualifications and desired qualities.  If you’re responding to a classified ad, follow up with a telephone call and ask for more information about the job.  The description, qualifications and desired qualities are the keys to preparing for the interview.  On a job announcement or job advertisement, these keys may be found under headings such as position description, duties, responsibilities and qualifications.

Here's a description for a supervisory job:

"The ideal candidate will possess excellent leadership, managerial, communications and inter-personal skills. The candidate should be a self-starter, team player, as well as promote teamwork among others, have a strong customer orientation, is approachable, and effective and creative problem solver, and establishes and maintains effective working relationships . . ."

The underlined words are the knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA's) that we’ve identified for this job.

Knowledge - information applied directly to the performance of a function.  For example, supervision is a knowledge.

Skills - learned acts.  In the example above, we have managerial skills.  Other examples include operating a personal computer, using a firearm or operating a backhoe.

Abilities - performance of behavior that you can see.  In the description above, communications is an ability.

Here are a number of the most frequently asked questions about the candidate:

1. Tell us about yourself.
   Keep your answer focused on job-related facts.  Typically your most recent experience provides the strongest case for your qualifications.  Start your answer with your most recent and most relevant experience.  1) Review your resume or application.  There is no right or wrong answer regarding experience.  Your experience is your experience for better or worse.  How you relate your experience to the job that you're interviewing for may make the difference in getting the job. 2)The most qualified person to perform a job is someone who has already performed the job.  If you were to hire someone to fix plumbing in your house, whom would you hire?  Someone who has never fixed the plumbing or someone who has?  As you answer the interview questions, cite your work and life experiences as examples to reinforce to the interviewers that you've already done what they're looking for, and you've done it successfully.  3) Many candidates make the mistake of emphasizing the number of years they've been on the job without providing detail as to the quality of their experience.  Provide the detail.  All else being equal, a candidate with more years on the job will be more qualified than you are.
   

2. What are your most outstanding qualities? 

3. What are your worst qualities?

4. Tell us about the passion in your life as it relates to your work.

5. If you had a choice, all considerations aside, what would you do for a livelihood?

6. Describe your ideal job.

7. Describe your worst nightmare job.

8. What is the most boring job that you’ve held?  What were your duties?

9. What is the most monotonous job that you’ve held?  How did you deal with the monotony?

10. What aspects of your work do you get the most excited about?

11. If you were to start your own company, what would that company do?

12. In what professional area have you improved yourself the most in the past two years?

13. Describe yourself.

14. Are you tough enough to get the job done? 

15. Do you have what it takes to succeed in this position?

16. What additional training will you need to successfully carry out your duties?

17. What additional experience will you need to meet the responsibilities of the job?

18. In what areas will you need to improve in to meet the responsibilities of the job?

19. You have five minutes to convince us that we should hire you.  Start.

20. Why are you someone I would want to work with?