If you're in an interview and your interviewer is not so skilled, you may have to prompt the interviewer to ask good questions. Yes, for those of you who dance, this is called "back-leading." I'm assuming you have prepared yourself in
Developing Your Interviewing Skills for Candidates, Part 1: Prepare for the Interview. Here's how this can play out.
I just love the question (not!): "
Why do you want to work here?" My non-career enhancing question is, "Why should I? If you manage like you interview, I don't!" But like I said, that's not helpful.
So here are
alternative ways to answer that question:
Candidate: "
Let me make sure I understand something about the project" or "
Let me make sure I understand something about your environment." You want to make sure you have a similar project in mind. Now, take your first set of projects, where you thought about your non-technical qualities, preferences, and skills, and answer in ways like this: "
I worked on a project like that" and point to the project on your resume. "
I enjoyed this part." Now, explain your role, how the project proceeded, what happened, and how you succeeded. What you've done is
take an open-ended but meaningless question and turned it into a behaviour-description answer. You've talked about your past experience and given the interviewer a place to start asking you more and hopefully better questions.
Sometimes, interviewers ask another of my not-so-favourite questions: "
Tell me about your strengths and weaknesses."
Instead, give a story about one of your successes on a project. If the interviewer says, "T
hat was a great strength, now how about a weakness?" go back to your homework and turn around one of your strengths. One of my favourite ways to answer that question is: "
Well, sometimes at the end of the project, I work too hard." Stop there. If the interviewer asks why that's a problem, you can say, "
I burn myself out without realizing it." That's actually a huge problem in projects. But interviewers who ask these questions might not realize that. Sigh.
Your job is to be prepared.
