1st round of job interview
Registered User
Joined: Jan 2004
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From: South Pasadena
1) Do you have any experience in ( Fill in Field ) ??
2) How would you describe yourself ??
3) What are your strong points, and what are your weak ones ??
4) What makes you stand out more than the other candidates ??
These are a few that I remember off the top of my head... I just gave 2 interviews in the last week.... If I have time at work, i'll post the list of questions I use to ask the candidates
Will-
2) How would you describe yourself ??
3) What are your strong points, and what are your weak ones ??
4) What makes you stand out more than the other candidates ??
These are a few that I remember off the top of my head... I just gave 2 interviews in the last week.... If I have time at work, i'll post the list of questions I use to ask the candidates
Will-
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Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 932
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From: South Pasadena
Well,
For the first answer, I am expecting them to say "yes" I do have experience and elaborate on that.
For the other three questions, I expect the same from everyone.... for example: I am a self motivated person, hard worker.. blah blah....
What I look for from the candidates is someone who is energetic and excited. Someone that could blow me away with their answers. Someone who can speak clearly, fast paced or slow paced without stumbling finding words. Also a person that is very confident with themselves always is a plus to me.
For the first answer, I am expecting them to say "yes" I do have experience and elaborate on that.
For the other three questions, I expect the same from everyone.... for example: I am a self motivated person, hard worker.. blah blah....
What I look for from the candidates is someone who is energetic and excited. Someone that could blow me away with their answers. Someone who can speak clearly, fast paced or slow paced without stumbling finding words. Also a person that is very confident with themselves always is a plus to me.
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Joined: Mar 2001
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From: Richmond
The "describe yourself" questions are fairly easy to deal with. They are generally poor questions for an interviewer to use since the candidate can pretty much make up whatever they want to say. Let's just say that a lot of candidates have an active imagination when it comes to their capabilities.
What you need to be on the look out for is the experienced-based interview. This is where the interviewer asks you to describe specific actions or characteristics you've used in the past. Based on your answer, the interviewer will ask specific follow-up questions, each one based on a piece of information you give. These questions will continue to go deeper and deeper.
From an interviewer perspecitve, this method is far from perfect, but it's a lot better than leaving the candidate to make up whatever they want. Sure, the candidate could lie about what they've done, but very few candidates could pull that off. Past experience is the best test an interviewer has to gauge.
Come up with 3 good stories about past projects / accomplishments. Think about everything you've done with those both good and bad. Once you have those, you can work in some examples regardless of the question:
Standard question:
Q: "How well do you work with team members"
A: "I work great with other team members. They really like me"
Experienced-based Question:
Q: "tell me about a time when you had to work on team"
A: "During my project where we were rolling out a widget which ended up generating xxx dolars, I had the opportunity to work on a team. We had to do blah blah blah. "
Follow up question to Exp. based answer:
Q: "you mentioned that the widget sold xxx dollars. What did you do, specifically, to make a positive impact on those sales?"
A: "blah blah blah"
Obviously, you can use the experienced-based answers to answer the first type of question.
To negagtive questions like "tell me something you need to work on" don't give lame answers like "I work too hard". Give something honest, that is not a character flaw, and follow up with how you are working to overcome that deficiency.
Also, be on the lookout for the stress interview too depending on what sort of job they are interviewing. These are common in sales positions. They are generally considered a poor choice for interviewers but they do happen. If you know what the interviewer is doing to strees you out, it makes it a lot easier to deal with it because you can see it for the "game" that it is.
What you need to be on the look out for is the experienced-based interview. This is where the interviewer asks you to describe specific actions or characteristics you've used in the past. Based on your answer, the interviewer will ask specific follow-up questions, each one based on a piece of information you give. These questions will continue to go deeper and deeper.
From an interviewer perspecitve, this method is far from perfect, but it's a lot better than leaving the candidate to make up whatever they want. Sure, the candidate could lie about what they've done, but very few candidates could pull that off. Past experience is the best test an interviewer has to gauge.
Come up with 3 good stories about past projects / accomplishments. Think about everything you've done with those both good and bad. Once you have those, you can work in some examples regardless of the question:
Standard question:
Q: "How well do you work with team members"
A: "I work great with other team members. They really like me"
Experienced-based Question:
Q: "tell me about a time when you had to work on team"
A: "During my project where we were rolling out a widget which ended up generating xxx dolars, I had the opportunity to work on a team. We had to do blah blah blah. "
Follow up question to Exp. based answer:
Q: "you mentioned that the widget sold xxx dollars. What did you do, specifically, to make a positive impact on those sales?"
A: "blah blah blah"
Obviously, you can use the experienced-based answers to answer the first type of question.
To negagtive questions like "tell me something you need to work on" don't give lame answers like "I work too hard". Give something honest, that is not a character flaw, and follow up with how you are working to overcome that deficiency.
Also, be on the lookout for the stress interview too depending on what sort of job they are interviewing. These are common in sales positions. They are generally considered a poor choice for interviewers but they do happen. If you know what the interviewer is doing to strees you out, it makes it a lot easier to deal with it because you can see it for the "game" that it is.
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Joined: Mar 2001
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From: Richmond
BTW Mingster - to address your original question, 1st interviews are generally screening interviews to weed out the good from the bad. At our business, they are generally done by low(er) level individuals or HR recruiters. 2nd and 3rd interviews are usually multi-interviews with several people in the area you'd be working in. For the most part we dont do panel interviews any longer but you may run into those. Those can be brutal. Basically, there's lots of different styles.
We have one interviewer that will keep asking technical question after technical question, knowing that there's no way you can know all the answers. Basically, he's waiting to see if you'll BS him or if you'll say "I don't know". In that situation, I would say "I dont know, but here's an example of a time that I didn't know something and here's how I figured it out".
We have one interviewer that will keep asking technical question after technical question, knowing that there's no way you can know all the answers. Basically, he's waiting to see if you'll BS him or if you'll say "I don't know". In that situation, I would say "I dont know, but here's an example of a time that I didn't know something and here's how I figured it out".