To successfully pass an interview, the applicant must be prepared for a variety of, even strange questions from a potential employer. Answers to some of them can and should be prepared in advance, while answering others, the candidate must show his skill in improvisation.
The most common interview questions are related to the applicant's education and professional skills, reasons for leaving the previous job, expected salary, benefits for the company when hiring a candidate, life plans and goals for the coming years.
The answers to these questions should not be formal, try to prepare succinct and concise answers to them, without wasting words showing your strengths.
Think ahead about the answers to these questions:
- What can you tell about yourself?
- What attracted you to this vacancy?
- How are you better than other candidates for this position?
- How do you see your life in a year
Non-standard questions
Sometimes recruiters ask weird, maybe even funny, questions during interviews. With their help, recruiting specialists determine the logical thinking ability, attentiveness and imagination of the candidate.
How would you answer the question: how many doorknobs are in the company's office? Just turn on the logic! Correct answer: twice as many doors. Why don't polar bears eat penguins? Some live in the Arctic, others in the Antarctic.
But some non-standard questions simply cannot be answered correctly.
- How to move a mountain?
- Imagine that you are a thousand times smaller in size, and you are sucked in by a vacuum cleaner. How will you get out of it?
- Rate your inadequacy on a ten-point scale.
With the help of your answers, the HR manager wants to assess creativity and the ability to be creative in solving problems, and sometimes this is how stress tolerance is tested.
Projective questions
HR managers know that often applicants, wanting to get a job, come to an interview with already prepared "correct" answers to typical questions. Therefore, experienced recruiters ask the candidate not only to tell about himself, but also to explain the motivation of people in general or some fictional character. These are called projective questions.
- What attracts people the most to the work of a programmer?
- What causes conflicts in the team?
- Why do some steal?
People, answering these questions, subconsciously transfer their own experience and judgments about life to others. Thus, projective questions help the recruiter to assess the applicant's motivation, conflict, attitude and ability to steal. It is impossible to prepare in advance for such questions, so when answering them try to just be yourself.
