101 Smart Questions to Ask on Your Interview (15 page)

Questions About the Next Step

How many other candidates have you interviewed?

How many more will you be interviewing before you expect to make a decision?

Before you’re able to reach a hiring decision, how many more interviews should I expect to go through and with whom?

With whom will I be meeting next (names and job titles)?

What issues are important to each of them?

What are they like?

Are they amiable, laid back, hard charging? You want to be ready for the personality you’re going to face. Won’t you act differently with a fire-breathing sales type than you would with a mild-mannered bean counter? Of course you would. Additionally, you wouldn’t want to overemphasize your computer expertise with the guy who is computer illiterate; it would just make him feel inferior . . . to a potential subordinate.

What are their ages and family situations?

You would not ask this question of a hiring manager or anyone else with direct input into the hiring decision. Since
they
can’t, by law, ask you these types of questions, you would (I hope) be careful to avoid such personal questions yourself. But even though it’s a small risk, I think it’s worth it to get whatever such information you can from the lower-level interviewers. The more you know, the more you can prepare.

How long have they been with the company?

If the interviewer is middle-aged and in a middle-management position at a smaller company, he’s either not the most ambitious person you ever met or has “risen to the level of his incompetence.” You may want to make him feel secure—by not coming on too strong—since he’s probably aware he isn’t moving any higher up the corporate ladder.

On the other hand, if you’re interviewing with a 27-year-old vice president who clearly seems destined for better things (and higher levels), you’ll want to convince her that you’re someone she’ll want to bring along for the ride, someone who can perhaps make her own rise quicker or easier.

You may not be able to find out the answers to all or even most of these personal questions, but you will certainly get helpful answers to some.
Whatever
you learn will be more than you knew before!

Based on the answers you receive to these kinds of questions, try to create a model of the person with whom you’ll be meeting: what she looks like, what makes her smile, what makes her angry, how she deals with stress, what seems important to her, what she’d laugh off.

Using this admittedly hypothetical “pseudo-interviewer,” picture yourself actually in the interview with her. Answer her questions. Ask yours. Counter her objections. Ask for the job! Even if the eventual reality bears little or no resemblance to the model you’ve constructed, doing this exercise makes you better prepared than just walking in cold.

All the research, assessment, and preparation is over. It’s time for the real thing—your interview with the hiring manager.

CHAPTER 5
QUESTIONS TO ASK YOUR NEW BOSS

The hiring manager may not be the person for whom you will be working, but he or she probably will be. Even where others have strong input, most companies still allow managers to hire their own staff, within certain parameters. He is probably a supervisor who has chosen (or is required) to shoehorn in-person interviews into his busy workdays. (In smaller companies especially, the president may be the ultimate decision-maker, even if you won’t be reporting to her.) A manager who has worked with a number of previous employees who held the same position brings a unique perspective to the proceedings.

What’s different about interviewing with the hiring manager as opposed to the time spent with a recruiter or headhunter or even Human Resources? This is the person you actually need to impress, the only one who can say those magic words, “
You’re hired. When can you start?
” This is the person you must be careful with.

The hiring manager’s primary objective is to
evaluate your skills and measure your personal chemistry on a firsthand basis.
These interviewers want to get to know everything they can about the people with whom they’ll be working closely. (As we’ve seen, the telephone screener, by contrast, may well be an entrepreneur who delegates heavily and interacts only intermittently with new hires. And the human screen usually has nothing to do with the day-to-day operation of the company.)

Common reasons for being dropped from a hiring manager’s “hot” list include: lack of personal chemistry or rapport; poor performance during the interview itself; and her assessment that, although you may be qualified and personable, you would simply not fit in well with the team.

Many hiring managers have an excellent intuitive sense of who will (and won’t) perform the job well and achieve a good fit with the rest of the work group. On the other hand, it sometimes comes as a surprise to applicants that excellent supervisors can be less than stellar interviewers. But a great many managers lack any formal training in the art of interviewing.

It is this type of interviewer who is most likely to interpret the interview as an opportunity to “get to know” more about you, rather than to require specific answers to questions about your background, experience, outlook on work, and interpersonal skills.

The Hiring Interview

Your first interview with the person who will manage your prospective position is not likely to be a walk in the park. You may be stepping out of the range of the experience and interviewing talent of the Human Resources professional and into unknown territory.

And you could wander there for a while.

Why? Experienced interviewers are trained to stay in charge of the interview, not let it meander down some dead-end, nonproductive track. There is a predictability to the way they conduct interviews, even if they utilize different techniques.

On the other hand, the hiring manager is sure to lack some or all of the screening interviewer’s knowledge, experience, and skill—making him an unpredictable animal.

A majority of corporate managers don’t know what it takes to hire the right candidate. Few of them have had formal training in conducting interviews of any kind. To make things worse, most managers feel slightly less comfortable conducting the interview than the nervous candidate sitting across the desk from them!

For example, a manager might decide you are not the right person for the job without ever realizing that the questions he or she asked were so ambiguous, so off the mark, that even the perfect candidate could not have returned the right answers. No one monitors the performance of the interviewer. And the candidate cannot be a mind reader. So more often than is necessary, otherwise perfectly qualified candidates walk out the door for good . . . simply because
the manager
failed at the interview!

Foiling the Inept Interviewer

But that doesn’t have to happen to you. You can—and should—be prepared to put your best foot forward, no matter what the experience or expertise of the manager interviewing you.

You’ll be a step ahead of the game (and the other candidates) if you realize at the outset that the interviewer is after more than just facts about your skills and background. He is waiting for something more elusive to hit him, something he may not even be able to articulate. He wants to feel that, somehow, you “fit” the organization or department.

Knowing what you’re up against is half the battle. Rather than sit back passively and hope for the best, you can help the unskilled interviewer focus on how your unique skills can directly benefit—“fit”—the department or organization by citing a number of specific examples. And by asking a number of smart questions.

What other unusual problems could you face during an interview?

The “It’s All About Me” Interviewer

Bob thinks he’s a pretty good interviewer. He has a list of 15 questions he asks every candidate—same questions, same order, every time. He takes notes on their answers and asks an occasional follow-up question. He gives candidates a chance to ask questions. He’s friendly, humorous, and excited about working at
Netcorp.com
. As he tells every candidate . . . in detail . . . for
hours.
Then he wonders why only a small fraction of his hires pan out.

I’ve never really understood the interviewer who thinks telling the story of his or her life is appropriate. Why do some interviewers do it? Partly nervousness, partly inexperience, but mostly because they have the mistaken notion they have to sell
you
on the company, rather than the other way around. There
are
occasions when this
may
be necessary—periods of low unemployment, a glut of particular jobs and a dearth of qualified candidates, a candidate who’s so desirable the interviewer feels, perhaps correctly, that he or she has to outsell and outbid the competition.

Under most circumstances, as I instruct novice interviewers in
Ask the Right Questions, Hire the Right People
(this book from the other side of the desk),
you
should be expected to carry the conversational load, while the interviewer sits back and decides if he or she is ready to buy what you’re selling.

Is it to your benefit to find yourself seated before Mr. Monologue? You might think so. After all, while he’s waxing poetic about the new cafeteria, you don’t have to worry about inserting your foot in your mouth. No explaining that last firing or why you’ve had four jobs in three months. Nope, just sit back, relax, and try to stay awake.

But I don’t believe Mr. M. is doing you any favors. Someone who monopolizes the conversation doesn’t give you the opportunity
you
need to “strut your stuff.” You may want to avoid leaving a bad impression, but I doubt you want to leave
no
impression at all. As long as you follow the advice in this book and, especially, this chapter, you should welcome the savvy interviewer who asks the open-ended, probing questions
he
needs to identify the right person for the job—the same questions
you
need to convince him it’s
you.

The “Out of It” Interviewer

Yes, interviewers have been known to be drunk, stoned, or otherwise incapacitated. Some have spent virtually the entire time allotted to a candidate speaking on the phone or browsing e-mail. Others have gone off on tirades about interoffice disputes or turf wars.

If the interviewer treats you with such apparent indifference before you’re even hired, how do you expect him to act once you
are
hired?

There
is
a boss out there willing to treat you with the same respect she would expect from you; it’s just not this one. Move on.

Time to Get Up Close and Personal

There are a number of styles and guiding philosophies when it comes to person-to-person interviews. The overall purpose, of course, is to screen you out if you lack the aptitudes (and attitudes) the company is looking for.

Although experienced interviewers may use more than one strategy, it’s essential to know which mode you’re in at any given point
and
what to do about it. Here’s a summary of the methods and objectives of the most common approaches.

The Behavioral Interview

Your conversations with the interviewer will focus almost exclusively on your past experience as he tries to learn more about how you have already behaved in a variety of on-the-job situations. Then he will attempt to use this information to extrapolate your future reactions on the job.

How did you handle yourself in some really tight spots? What kinds of on-the-job disasters have you survived? Did you do the right thing? What were the repercussions of your decisions?

Be careful what you say. Every situation you faced was unique, so be sure to let the interviewer in on specific limitations you had to deal with. Did you lack adequate staff? Support from management? The latest software? If you made the mistake of plunging in too quickly, say so and admit that you’ve learned to think things through. Explain what you’d do differently the next time around.

Remember: Those interviewers using a behavioral interview are trying to ensure you can really walk the walk, not just talk the talk. So leave out the generalizations and philosophizing, and don’t get lost in the details. In other words, just tell them the problems you faced, the actions you took, and the results you achieved, without exaggeration.

Which is why composing three or four “stories”—actual experiences that illustrate your most important skills or qualifications—is important preparation. Just make sure to structure them in “Problem-Solution-Action” format.

The Team Interview

Today’s organizational hierarchies are becoming flatter. That means that people at every level of a company are more likely to become involved in a variety of projects and tasks, including interviewing
you.

The team interview can range from a pleasant conversation to a torturous interrogation. Typically, you will meet with a group, or “team,” of interviewers around a table in a conference room. They may be members of your prospective department or a cross-section of employees from throughout the company. (A slightly less stressful variation is the tag-team approach, in which a single questioner exits and is followed by a different questioner a few minutes—or questions—later.) Rarely will you be informed beforehand to expect a team interview.

The hiring manager or someone from Human Resources may chair an orderly session of question-and-answer, or he may turn the group loose to shoot questions at you like a firing squad. When it’s all over, you’ll have to survive the assessment of every member of the group.