interview questions and answers

Analyze Every Question - interview questions and answers
You should by now realize that every question that is asked by an experienced interviewer has a purpose. It is important that you analyze the question and understand its purpose before answering. This may sound like a tall order, performing this in real time before answering! Won't this lead to long pauses?

Your brain can process spoken words at about 600 words per minute; whereas the average person speaks at around 100 words per minute. Therefore, there really is a lot of spare capacity to process precisely what they are saying. As the question is being asked, ask yourself:
1. WHY am I being asked this question?
2. WHAT is the area of concern to the interviewer?
3. HOW can I lower their anxiety?

If you have followed the advice given earlier in this course you will have a complete armoury of information from which to select. Your task then becomes quite simple. Choose the most relevant and positive information you have about yourself and give it to them.

interview questions and answers - Sell Your Benefits
In treating the interview like a sales meeting, it is worth keeping a very common sales slogan in mind: Sell the sizzle, not the sausage. This slogan stresses that you sell the benefits and not the feature. In an everyday sales arena a salesman might be selling an expensive gas fireplace, whilst operating in front of a live demonstration model in the showroom. Here, the customer can see all the obvious features; like design, craftsmanship and the real-fire effect. The good salesman wont waste his breath describing what is totally obvious to anyone looking at the fire; but will stress all the real benefits; like speed at heating a cold room, fuel efficiency, self cleaning flue, etc. Likewise, your features your skills experience and abilities are all clearly identified on your CV; so when you highlight these during the interview you should do so by linking your feature to a demonstrable benefit. You are at the interview on the strength of your application to date, but you need to secure the job offer. To do that you need to convince the interviewer that your features have brought real benefits to previous employers. The association will be that you are a benefit bringer, and that pattern will continue for their organization.

Link Phrases
In order to sell your career benefits it can be helpful to think in terms of ‘link phrases’ that serve to link a past experience to the benefit it brought. For example:
“At TaylorCraft I reorganized the sales team, which led directly to an annual sales increase of 25%.”
“Last year I ran a series of customer care workshops which resulted in a significant reduction in customer complaints.”
“I implemented an online sales reporting system so that the sales force could send their orders to head office the same day.”
“In my last role I was responsible for developing the just-in-time logistics system, the benefit was that we only needed to hold half our previous stock levels.”

Basic Types of Question
The heart of the interview is the interview questions and answers session. If you are not careful you can rapidly find yourself on the defensive, trying to justify yourself in the face of tough questions rather than having the chance to 'sell your benefits’. A well-trained interviewer will throw all sorts of odd and challenging questions at you in an attempt to assess your true suitability for the job.

They will often deliberately create stressful situations to see how you react. In fact, the tougher the questions, the better you're doing. Knowing how to answer them with the 'correct' type of answer is the key to success or failure. The good news is that interviewers ask only three basic types of question:
Can you do the job?
Will you do the job?
Will you fit in?

Can You Do the Job?
The first type of question is seeking to determine whether or not you are capable of doing the job. These questions will be about your skills, attitudes, knowledge and experience in short your track record. Typically about 60 per cent of a professional interviewer’s time will be spent assessing your abilities against those required by the position on offer. You should be looking for any opportunity to impart information about your skills and abilities, backing them up with examples of what you have already achieved. Here are some examples of this category of question:

What is your greatest strength?
If you've done your homework before the interview, you would have several strengths to choose from. The obvious choice would be the strength which best suits the demands of the job. This is one of the most common questions and represents a good opportunity to assert your career statement. How to answer this question is covered in detail in the study area titled Selling Yourself.

What skill have you acquired most recently?
Here the interviewer is seeking to establish that you are an interested, active lifelong learner and not somebody who has just attained a variety of disparate qualifications along the way. Try to avoid putting a timeframe on your answer, unless you attended a course very recently and try to add details of how you have already applied the new skill in the workplace.

Can you work well under pressure?
This is a closed question and can be a sign of an untrained interviewer. Use the opportunity to give a comprehensive but brief answer focusing on several clear-cut examples showing your ability to cope under pressure.

Specific, job related questions
The interviewer may ask any number of questions that relate to your past experience and how this might influence your suitability for the current position. Here you will need to call on the work you did in analyzing your own career achievements, as explained earlier in the course. Using real examples and framing these in terms of a problem or challenge that you successfully addressed is the key to answering job related questions.