The most commonly asked job interview questions and how to answer them
If your job interviewer has any skill, you will likely be asked some questions that are specific to the role that you’re applying for and the organization as a whole. The best way to prepare for these is to do your homework. You should walk into the interview with a good idea about what the main challenges for the company are and how your potential job can help contribute to overcoming them.
And then there are all of the other questions. What are your greatest weaknesses? Where do you see yourself in five years? Why should I hire you?
These questions can be tricky to answer off the top of your head, but because many of them are so common and regularly come up in interviews across industries, you can also prepare for these in advance.
Job interviews are how employers establish whether or not you will be a good fit with the team, so personality matters. For example, one of my favourite questions that I ask in interviews is, “What did you want to be when you grew up?”
I’m not looking for the candidate to name the exact job that I’m hiring for. (I mean, it would be great if that believably happened to be the case, but I get that most people change career ambitions numerous times throughout their life.) The answers I like to hear are the ones that tell the story of what the candidate was like as a child and how their education and experience have evolved them over the years to the career path that they are on now – one in which the job they are interviewing for is a logical next step.
Here is a handy infographic from Graphs.net that does a nice job of summarizing 35 of the most commonly asked questions in a job interview along with suggestions for how to answer them.
Click on the image to open the full-sized infographic as a jpg.
Source: Graphs.net
