Job Interview Questions

So it is with each job interview. Each time you meet with a hiring manager, you have an irreplaceable opportunity to ask for the offer.

“When I’m interviewing a candidate for a sales position, I want them to close me,” says Bob Conlin, VP of Incentive Systems in Bedford, Massachusetts. “If they give me a soft close, or, worse, no close at all, I get concerned.” Here’s an example of what Conlin considers to be a hard close:

Bob, every year I’m going to be your number-one guy. Every year I’m going to beat quota. I’m your candidate.When can I start?

“I know I’m being closed here,” he says. “The candidate is speaking my language. His confidence is infectious.”

But Conlin also wants to see evidence that the candidate is mindful of the organization’s goals, not just the salesperson’s goals. The following question is even more thoughtful because it demonstrates that the candidate is already thinking as a member of a team:

I know I can drive the revenues and net the customers.What kinds of processes are in place to help me work collaboratively?

Besides asking for the job, bid-for-action questions ask for an indication of how favorably the interviewer assesses you. One way to assess a company’s interest is to see how hard the interviewer tries to sell you on accepting the job when you ask these questions. Some candidates grow pale at saying something as blatant as:

Are you ready to make me an offer now, or do I need to sell myself some more?

But what do you have to lose? If the job you are applying for has any marketing or management quality at all, the interviewer will be impressed by your confidence. Every great salesperson knows to “ask for the order.” Here’s how to ask for the job in the final interview. Begin with a statement of your understanding of the opportunity:

As I understand it, the successful candidate will be someone with x education, y qualifications, and z experience. Do I understand the opportunity correctly?

Here your purpose is threefold. First, you are testing to see if you indeed understand the situation. If you missed something, or, more likely, the interviewer forgot some important requirement, now is the time to get it right. Second, assuming you summarized the position correctly, the interviewer is impressed by your organizational skills. Third, asking for agreement at this point is a strategy for getting the interviewer into the habit of saying yes. Yes is the answer you want to the next question, and it’s good to have the interviewer in a yes mood. The critical next question is:

Do I meet the requirements?

Now wait. That’s the hard part. The interviewer is making up his or her mind. The answer will tell you if it is time to close or if you have more persuading to do. If the interviewer is positive and says that, yes (there’s that word again), you have all the qualifications, you can now deliver the strongest closing line there is:

I’m glad we agree. I feel that way, too. So I am certainly interested in receiving your strongest offer.

But I must issue a fair warning. You are on dangerous ground here. Your decision to ask for the job must be pitch-perfect. Before asking for the job, you must have created a good rapport with your interviewer, established that you are a good fit for the job, and extracted at least some expression of interest from the interviewer. Your timing must be so perfect the interviewer could set her watch by it. In other words, unless you have a high degree of confidence about each of these points, I wouldn’t take a chance. It’s a risky move for two reasons:

First, while asking a prospect to say yes to an order for a gross of pens with the business’s logo emblazoned on them might occasionally get the prospect to sign on the bottom line, it’s highly unlikely that you will actually get a hiring manager to say, “Sure, you want the job? You got it! When can you start?” Even the hiring manager has a process to go through and must consult with others. Still, asking for the job might move you up in the crowd.

And second, it might blow you out of the water. That’s because in contemporary American business culture, asking for something as important as a job is loaded with a lot of emotional baggage. It’s very much like talking about money. Talking directly about money is taboo. Everyone knows it’s the most important part of the conversation in a job interview, yet the pretense we all have about money relegates it to the end, almost as if money were an afterthought.

So it is with the business of directly asking for a job. Still, the benefits usually outweigh the risks. If your tone is pitch-perfect and your timing is right, asking for the job will help differentiate your credentials from the crowd, reinforce your value proposition, and in extremely rare cases, even land you an offer on the spot.

This marvelous question, recommended by Irv Zuckerman in his book Hire Power, lets the candidate effectively seize control of the interview in a way that many interviewers find reassuring. Here’s a typical exchange (with comments) between an interviewer and a candidate:

INTERVIEWER: Thank you for coming. Can I get you a cup of coffee?

CANDIDATE: No, thank you. Perhaps later. (Leaving the door open softens the refusal to accept the interviewer’s hospitality. Avoid anything that might spill. Also you will need your hands free for taking notes on the important information you are about to receive.)

INTERVIEWER: Well, then, make yourself comfortable. Can you tell me about yourself?

CANDIDATE: I’ll be glad to. But first, may I ask a question? (Always ask permission.)

INTERVIEWER: Of course. (You will never be refused. The interviewer is now curious about what you are going to ask.) CANDIDATE: My question is this: By what criteria will you select the person for this job?

I NTERVIEWER: That’s a good question. CANDIDATE: Is it all right if I take notes? (Always ask permission.) INTERVIEWER: Of course. Now, let me see. I think the first criterion is…

Now listen. When the interviewer is done reviewing the first criterion, ask about the second. Then the third. Pretty soon you will have a list of the interviewer’s hot buttons, a recipe for the ideal candidate for the job. Your challenge is to underscore how your credentials and experience just happen to fall in perfect alignment with those very criteria.

Let’s back up a minute. Notice what else you have accomplished by asking this marvelous question. You have seized control of the interview. Suddenly the interviewer is working according to your agenda. The question-by what criteria will you select the person for this job-is designed to put you in the driver’s seat. Play with the wording at your own risk. Look at how the question parses:

By what criteria. This part of the question focuses the discussion where it belongs—on the job and its requirements, rather than your education, experience, age, gender, etc. What the hiring manager really wants is someone who can do the job and will fit in. Are you that someone? Can you prove it? That’s your goal in the next phases of the interview.

will you select. This acknowledges the authority of the decision maker. It is critical for you to know if, by chance, you are talking to someone who is not the decision maker, but merely a gatekeeper. In either case, you need to focus on the action verb in the clause and what you must provide in order to be selected.

the person. Only one person will be selected for this particular job. You want that person to be you. One of your jobs in the interview is to remind the hiring manager that you are a wellrounded, likable person who will fit in with the other people in the organization.

for this job. This phrase underscores the idea that the subject of this conversation is a job that the interviewer needs to fill because a vital organizational function is not being done. Furthermore, the ideal remedy for the problem is available and ready to start.

Yes, money and benefits are important. I guarantee you will have this conversation after the company expresses an interest in you. Your bargaining position will be much stronger then, so just resist asking about money and concentrate on showing that you understand the company’s challenges and can help solve them.

On the other hand, let’s be real. Money is critical, so why should it be so awkward to acknowledge that fact? True, most career counselors and job-hunting experts suggest it is taboo for you to ask about pay before the interviewer does, but I think it’s possible to be too rigid on this point. Occasionally it may make sense for the candidate to initiate a relaxed conversation about pay issues at an early point in the interview. Any reasonable person would expect rate of pay, health benefits, and what constitutes the workweek to be important topics. To pointedly ignore them diminishes the honesty of the relationship between the candidate and the interviewer, surely not an auspicious way to start a relationship with someone who may become your immediate supervisor and mentor.

There is one exception when issues of pay should come first, not last. That exception refers to salespeople who are paid by commission, not salary. With salespeople, the acknowledged desire to earn a high income is considered an unalloyed virtue. Companies actually like to see a reasonable level of greediness in their salespeople. The system is set up so that salespeople make money only if they earn the company a lot more money. Thus if you are interviewing for a sales job, it can be appropriate for you to raise the issue of commissions, royalties, quotas, and other compensation issues early on in the interview.

Everyone has a different killer question. Ask yourself, if you could present just one question, what would it be? Think about the brand you want to present. You are that brand. Take some time to think of the question that allows you to differentiate yourself from the crowd. In many cases, the killer question has three elements:

• A statement that you appreciate the company’s challenges or problem
• An assertion that you can solve the problem
• A request that you be given the opportunity to do so

The thoroughness with which you prepare for this question goes a long way in deciding whether you will be successful in getting a job offer.

Formulating open-ended, penetrating questions gives you a leg up on the competition. The right questions give the hiring manager a better picture of your value proposition to the company, the only basis on which you will be offered a position. The 15 rules that follow provide guidance to help you strategize about the questions you will take into your job interviews. Now is the time to be intentional about the interview, to take control, and to put your best foot forward.

Well, the situation I’ve just described is your next job interview. It’s a presentation. The agenda: your future at the company. In the audience: the senior decision makers required to authorize offering you a position. Everyone is looking at you to shine. Now, given the stakes, are you willing to wing it? If you’re comfortable with working like that, there’s little need to read further.

Some applicants believe that spontaneity can make up for lack of strategic planning. But spontaneity, in cases such as this, can be indistinguishable from laziness and lack of preparation. Interviewers, professionals themselves, really want you to prepare for the interview as they did. Preparation is professionalism in action. It’s common sense. It’s courtesy. It works.

In fact, Bryant Howroyd’s practice is to ask just one question, and then immediately throw the ball to the job seeker. Bryant Howroyd’s first question, after greeting the job seeker, is:

What is your understanding of our meeting today?
How’s that for turning the interview topsy-turvy?

But Bryant Howroyd understands she can tell more from candidates by the quality of their questions than by the quality of their answers. So the next instruction is:
I would now like you to ask me seven questions.

Depending on the quality of the applicant’s response to the first query, Bryant Howroyd invites the applicant to ask her from three to seven specific questions. The higher her initial estimation of the applicant, the more questions she requests. What’s more, Bryant Howroyd gives the applicant permission to ask her any questions at all. No limits. And then she listens. “I learn a lot more about people by allowing them to ask me what they want to know than by having them tell me what they think I want to know,” she says. True, the hiring company ultimately selects the applicant, but “the applicants I most admire insist on being full partners in the selection process,” she says. Now, are you really ready for an interview with Janice Bryant

Howroyd? Robin Upton is a career coach at Bernard Haldane Associates, the largest career management firm in the United States. Based in the firm’s office in Dallas, Texas, Upton coaches her candidates to ask two questions of the hiring manager. The first question is:

Now that we have talked about my qualifications, do you have any concerns about me fulfilling the responsibilities of this position?

Does it seem counterintuitive to ask the interviewer to articulate his or her concerns? Many candidates think so. But they are being shortsighted, Upton argues. Once objections are stated, the candidate can usually address them in a way that is satisfactory. Unstated objections will doom the candidate every time. Upton’s second question is:

As my direct report in this position, what are the three top priorities you would first like to see accomplished?

This question, she says, effectively determines the hot buttons of the hiring manager, demonstrates the candidate’s understanding that every hiring manager has priorities, and underscores the candidate’s commitment to action by the final word in the question. Remember, “accomplish” is a term dear to the heart of every hiring manager.

If you don’t ask questions in the interview, many recruiters will wonder if you will avoid asking questions on the job. “If I set up a scenario for a technical candidate, and they don’t ask qualifying questions, I really wonder if that is how they would approach an application development project,” says Kathi Jones, director of Employee Central at Aventail, a Seattle-based provider of extranet services. “Are they letting ego get in the way of asking the hard questions? Do they play on a team or play against the team? I think you can learn as much from someone’s questions and their thought process as you can from the answers,” she adds.

Here’s another wrinkle. Recruiters expect candidates to ask enough questions to form an opinion about whether they want the job or not. If you don’t ask enough questions, recruiters who may otherwise be willing to make you an offer may nevertheless reject you because they have no confidence you know what you would be getting into. “At the end of the day, as the interviewer, I need to feel satisfied that the candidate has enough information on which to make a decision in case I make an offer,” says Richard Kathnelson, VP of human resources at Syndesis, Inc., in Ontario, Canada. Open-ended questions that generate information-rich answers signal to Kathnelson that he is talking to a resourceful candidate who knows how to make informed decisions, a skill vital to any job.