2) Cross out the ones that make you look bad. “I forgot to order paper for the copy machine, and so we couldn’t file those important papers on time, and my boss screamed at me and nearly fired me. But I breathed in a bag for awhile and slept it off – the stress wasn’t that big a deal.” Your answer should not be anything like that – the interviewer doesn’t care about how it affected you personally. They care about how it affected your work. You also don’t want to tell them about a situation where you’re responsible for the goof. Ideally, the problem will either be no one’s fault or someone else’s.
3) Pick an example where you did something productive despite the stress. If you had a really tight deadline that threatened to derail your project, and you worked overtime for a week to get it out in time, that’s a good example. If you were being screamed at by an irrational customer, and managed to keep your cool and keep him satisfied in the end, that’s a good example. There has to be some active step that you took to solve the problem in your story.

4) Don’t focus excessively on the “pressure” part of the question. There should be some pressures on you in your example. But the main priority is to show that you responded well in a previous situation, not that you’ve been subjected to the most mind-blowingly stressful situation imaginable. That means you should focus less on the worst situations you’ve been in from your list and more on the ones that have turned out well despite problems along the way.

If they just ask you some variation like “how do you handle stressful situations,” you should really be answering it the same way. It’s hard to give a good generic answer to that. Saying “I keep my cool and I’m levelheaded” isn’t going to make you stand out. A story about how you handled a previous situation will be unique and will get the point across better anyway. So just say something like “Well, I can give you an example…” and give the same answer you’d give to the question asking you to name a specific situation.

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1) Don’t list a strength instead of a weakness. “I’m such a workaholic that I’d probably be at your office working 5 hours of unpaid overtime a day.” “I’m a perfectionist and always do everything right. I just can’t bring myself to make mistakes.” “I tend to get too interested in learning new things and trying to find ways to be efficient on the job.” “I like my bosses too much.” The interviewer will have heard this tack over and over again. It’s an EXTREMELY common kind of answer to this question, and you’re basically refusing to answer the question. You won’t score points by repeating the same canned garbage everyone else does. Plus, what if they call you on it? What are you going to do if they say, “That’s not a weakness, list another.” You’ll sit there and stammer – and it won’t look good.

2) Don’t tell them a major weakness that might actually cost you the job. “I have a drinking problem, and I don’t come to work on time.” “I don’t like working with other people. I spend my days plotting against coworkers.” “I’m a screamer.” If the weakness is one that they aren’t going to want in an employee – honesty is not the best policy. Don’t come out and tell them all your major faults. Everyone has them, but you can’t go blabbing about them in your job interview just because they ask. People who do that don’t get jobs.

3) Don’t claim you don’t have any weaknesses. Are you Superman? Kryptonite. Everyone has something wrong with them. Again, you are just refusing to answer the question – and that doesn’t win you any points and might get you called on it.

What should you do instead? Here are some better approaches to the question:
1) List a weakness you’ve already overcome. The point with this is to show that you’ve got the character to get around your problems and deal with them. One answer I’ve used personally is a fear of public speaking. I don’t have big problems with this and am actually very good at it (with various related stuff on my resume) – but I didn’t start out that way. Doing speech and debate events in school started out being terrifying, and I got nervous to the point of vomiting a few times. So I just worked up an answer about how I kept at it, didn’t do well at first but kept trying until I did, and by practicing a bunch without anyone there eventually got to the point where it wasn’t as big a deal. I pointed out that I still get feel nervous, but it doesn’t interfere with doing it anymore. This answer went over really well, and you may have to think through your background and past to find something like that – but surely you’ve overcome something. Everyone has had some kind of difficulty in life they had to deal with. Try to pick something inherent to you or related to where your resume shines – if you’ve overcome some obstacle on the way to success, point it out. Also try to pick something where you continue working at it, but you’ve basically solved the problem. That way you can at least say it’s a present weakness, just not one that will affect your job.

2) List a weakness that can be eliminated. If you can’t think of a weakness you’ve already dealt with, at a minimum list something that you’ll be able to deal with in the future – and make sure you tell the interviewer a list of steps you’re taking and will take to solve that weakness. If your weakness is that you prefer to work alone rather than on teams – maybe point to instances where you’ve voluntarily tried to be a member of a team to solve that. Talk about how you tried to cultivate working relationships with your coworkers or came together with another person to work on something even when you would have preferred to do it on your own. Your message has to be that you understand your weakness, you minimize it, and it won’t be a problem. Here’s one of mine: I’m unorganized. What do I do about it? Actually, nothing, because I sort of pile papers around my office and know where they are and what I need to do. But I could think of a lot of ways I COULD work on that – maybe point to a computer program I use to enter tasks and have it notify me when to do them. Our work e-mail has that option. Maybe start writing “to-do” lists for each day. It’s a weakness, but if you have that particular weakness as well, you can point out a lot of things that let you get by without being a type-A.

3) Admit something minor that doesn’t really affect your job. This isn’t as good an answer as the first two. But if you can’t think of anything good to say, at the very least you want the question to go away without hurting you. So confess to something that won’t scare them off. You should be able to think of something that you can fix, however, and if you can’t – spend some more time thinking.

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First off, why are they asking you this question? Usually, the interviewer wants to find out a couple of things. It can tell them if there are any major problems with the way you interact with people or the way you would fit with their company. If you start into a rant about something about the old company that applies to the job you’re looking for, too, you’re going to get knocked off their list. It’s a pretty open-ended question, and it can give them hints about what kind of person you are depending on how you answer. It can also let them know things like why you want the job you’re applying for and what you’ll be like as an employee. Interviewers like questions that make you talk – not just because it gives them less work, but because prompting you for your thoughts can show them all kinds of things about your personality they won’t be able to find out from a resume.

So what kind of answer should you give?

1) Don’t say anything negative about your old company. This is just too risky. There are only a few situations where this is a good idea, and that’s if it’s obvious to everyone in the world why you’re leaving. If you were an Enron employee who was interviewing for a new job right after the collapse, then you pretty much have to say something negative. But it shouldn’t be a 15 minute rant on how bad things were. It should be a short “My old company just collapsed – I was happy in my job, but that’s how things worked out.” Otherwise, you need to stay away from the criticism. Don’t say:

“My boss kept micromanaging me, and he didn’t know what the heck he was doing. I could have done his job. My coworkers were gutless morons who you just couldn’t count on to do anything. I had to redo all their work. And then they wouldn’t fix the elevators, so I had to walk up the stairs with my hip. Oh, and don’t get me started on casual Friday…”

Ranting is bad for a couple of reasons. People don’t like negative people. You’re also likely to start in on something that the new company looking to hire you might do themselves. Offices tend to have the same problems everywhere. The guy interviewing you might be a micromanager, too. He might think he is, even if he’s nowhere near as bad as your old boss. Finally, it can just make you look like a nut.

2) Talk about positive things about why you want a new job. This question is not an opening to show them how bad your old company was – it’s a chance to show you want to grow and change as an employee. Talk up the good things about the position you’re applying for. Something like:

“I liked my old job editing business articles for Major Newspaper, but my goal coming out of college was always to be a writer. I think I got a lot out of learning to edit, and it’s improved my writing quite a bit. But now I would like to go on to doing what my original goal was as a business reporter for your newspaper, where I would be writing articles on a day-to-day basis. I’d use the skills from my old job as well as meeting my own career objectives.”

This doesn’t make you sound like a crazy, disgruntled employee. You want to come off as the employee who is changing places in their career or who sees something different about the new job they would enjoy a lot more – not as the office problem.

3) If you’ve got a legitimate, neutral reason for changing jobs, then just say that. I’m talking about a normal excuse we would all see as OK that doesn’t speak negatively about anyone involved. Did you just get married, and you and your wife decided to move to a new city to be closer to family? No one is going to get mad about that or think it looks bad. Is your older mother ill, and you moved to be closer to her? You got injured and can’t do your old job, so you want one less physically active? These things are all stuff that the interviewer will only have a problem with if they’ve got some kind of problem. Just say the reason briefly, and then say something positive about your old company – you liked working there and enjoyed your job, but sometimes these things happen.

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This is a pretty standard question and is often suggested to interviewers as a way to find out the answers to these questions. So here are a few guidelines to answering it:

1) Work in some specific facts about the employer in your answer. You’ve been researching about the companies you’re interviewing with, right? If you haven’t been, you need to start. They expect you to have basic knowledge about what they do and who they are. And part of acing this question is showing the interviewer that you’ve done your homework. So before you go out to the interview, list two or three things you like about that company. Preferably, these should be things that are actually unique to them. If you’re interviewing at Apple, you might say “Well, I like the quirky attitude you seem to have. You’ve got a reputation of fostering creativity and I like the fact that I’d be working on products that are accessible to normal consumers.” That would at least show that you’ve seen an Ipod or an Apple commercial and know how they’re trying to brand themselves. It’s not enough on its own as an answer to point to something random like this – but it’s a key part of making your answer a good one.

2) Don’t tell them the real answer. You want to make a lot of money, and they have a good salary. You like the health benefits. The company across the street turned you down. You don’t care about their company, but you want to work in that city. 99% of the time the real answer to this question is something they don’t want to hear. The reality is that people consider things like salary first in working for a company, and things like whether they are somehow different than all the other companies you could be working for comes in a distant last. You’re expected to be spouting some corporate teamspeak here, so get used to it.

3) After saying a few positive things about the company that show you’ve researched it, segue into something about the job itself and why you think you’d be a good fit there. You don’t want to spend all your time regurgitating stuff off the company website. You have to cover that base, and then move on to talking about the job itself – answering the question of why you want to work in that particular job at that company. So your full answer for an Apple interview might be:

“Well, I like the quirky attitude you seem to have. You’ve got a reputation of fostering creativity and I like the fact that I’d be working on products that are accessible to normal consumers. I’ve got an Ipod myself, and I like the idea of going to work for a company whose products I already use. It makes me feel kind of like I have a stake in what’s going on. I also think I would be a good fit as a public relations manager. One of the things I’ve focused on in my career is marketing to young people. When I worked for Generic Public Relations Firm, I spent a lot of my time on campaigns targeted at 18-24 year olds. I enjoyed that a lot, and I think I would be pretty effective with my experience marketing a product I like using myself to a demographic I’ve got some experience marketing things to. The job here just seems like a good fit with my experience, personality, and interests.”

4) Don’t make up stuff you aren’t ready to back up. Don’t use an Ipod? Well, it’s not a good idea to pretend that you do. The people interviewing you WORK at that company. There’s a pretty good chance they can ask you some specific questions about their own company. So stick to general comments or something you actually do know about them. Don’t try to bluff on this one.  

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Today’s generic question is a common one that can throw many people who aren’t ready for it: What other jobs have you been interviewing for? The instinctive response among people who haven’t heard the question is usually “That’s none of your business.” Unfortunately, that’s not what the person asking the question wants to hear – and the key to answering these generic questions is to give them the answer that makes you look best. Here’s a few guidelines for your answer:

1) Tell them about jobs that are similar – in the same field and requiring the same responsibilities. One of the things this question is designed to do is tip off the interviewer as to if you’re not really interested in the job you’re applying for. If you’re trying to be an accountant and you tell them that you interviewed to be a forest ranger just yesterday, it doesn’t exactly suggest that you’re committed to the job they’re hiring you for.

2) Tell them about jobs that are just below or just above the one you’re applying for in terms of prestige. If you are applying to a $80,000 a year accountant position, it sounds bad if the other job interview you did was with a temp agency. That’s a tip off that maybe other people aren’t interested in hiring you for a good reason. On the flip side, if you’re applying for a $300,000 a year CFO position, maybe you’re overqualified and aren’t going to stay long.

3) Don’t lie and make up fake interviews. It’s very easy for them to check up if you say that you interviewed with Company X across the street. It looks really bad if they call them up and you haven’t.

4) If you haven’t interviewed for another position, tell them about the other ones you’re applying for. If you’re in this situation, and it’s your only or first interview in your job search, then tell them about some of the other positions you sent out resumes for. Make clear that they haven’t gotten back to you yet and that you have just started your job search.

5) Focus on what you’re looking for in a position, not the positions themselves. Essentially, what this question is asking you to do is to explain what you’re looking for in a job using your other positions as an illustration. It’s not some kind of trick question to figure out who they’re competing against. So refer to the other positions – but then segue into a discussion of why you selected them that explains why you would also enjoy working at the company you’re currently interviewing with.

Example good answer:

“Well, I’ve had a couple of interviews this week. I interviewed for a project manager position over at Generic Software Corporation. It’s a job where I would basically be overseeing their Virus Destroyer 2.0 development. I would be in charge of four different employees, setting guidelines for their work, doing some programming of my own, and bringing the work together into a cohesive whole. It’s similar to what I’d be doing here – a different kind of software, but I would be managing people and maybe doing a little more programming than in this job. My other interview was with Globosoft for a position as a junior project manager working on their operating system. It’s a much bigger program, so I wouldn’t be in charge of the whole thing. I’d be working on the widgets function, supervising two employees. I would report to a senior manager who would coordinate our work with the other teams. It would be a different experience from this job in the sense that I’d only be in charge of a part of the software project – but the day to day work would be very similar.”

Example Bad Answers:

“I’ve got a waiter gig lined up at Bennigan’s, but if that falls through I’d totally do the programming thing.”

“I interviewed last week with Globosoft and I LOVED THEM! They are so awesome compared to you for the following fifty reasons…”

“I interviewed last week with Globosoft but that job totally blew. I would never take it, and am only considering the hallowed halls of your company, with whom no other employer can compete. In Compusoft’s name I pray.”

“I interviewed with Globosoft for a project manager position where I’d have to supervise other people, and I am much more comfortable working on my own as a programmer. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy the supervision of people I’d have to do in THIS job – I mean, that I can handle.”

“I sent out 500 resumes and this one is the only response I got! Guess you guys got lucky!”

“I’ve got forty other interviews. This one is backup number 24, and if those other ones don’t work out, I could even get down my list to this job.”

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