Preparing for the Interview
January 23, 2008
How can you prepare for the interview BEFORE you go in to meet the employer?
- Figure out as much as possible about the employer’s needs.
- Find out more than the average interviewee about the company and the hiring manager’s concerns.
- Compose answers to frequently asked interview questions.
- Rehearse answers to those questions.
- If you have an opportunity to do practice interview, such a mock interview, do it.
- If you have opportunity to be videotaped, do it.
- DO NOT rehearse canned answers out of books. Interviewers have heard them all.
- Transferable Skills: Be sure to point out your transferable skills with examples that are not always evident from your work experience or education.
If you are prepping for a job interview, you’ll find all the practice interview questions you could possibly ever want!
One of the best ways to prepare for a job interview is to review lists of typically asked interview questions. You can mentally prepare your answers, and you may even find it helpful to write down your responses, a process that helps you to thoughtfully organize them and compose them in an articulate fashion. Just don’t hung up trying to remember your answers word-for-word during the interview.
Many collections are available on the Web.
The biggest, most comprehensive interview question site we’ve found:
- Interview Network’s Interview Question Bank Subject and Keyword Index. Because this one is broken down by subject, you can find interview questions appropriate to your field.
Question collections with special features:
- The University of Virginia’s Career Services office offers a pdf booklet on Case Interviewing, which has some great information and insights for this particular type of interview.
- AARP offers a special collection of questions for mid-career and older workers, Handling Difficult Interview Questions , that includes those sticky, borderline illegal, age-related questions that are sometimes directed at older workers, as well as other interview resources.
Question collections geared to specific fields. Although some questions in these collections are specific to their fields, the sites also offer more general interview questions:
- Library Science. The University of South Carolina’s Library Science site offers Frequently Asked Interview Questions as Reported by Library Students.
Behavior-based questions. Sample questions for the increasingly popular behavior-based style of interviewing:
Other interviewing questions collections:
- The University of Virginia’s career center has a list of Questions to Ask and Questions You May Be Asked.
- This site has Questions to Expect During Your Interview, which includes 58 questions, some very odd and borderline illegal.
- The list of 58 Frequently Asked Interview Questions at the Fox Valley Technical College site is part of Interviewing Tips online booklet.
- Brain Bank offers Job Interview Questions.
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