Most Common Interview Questions and How to Answer
Today employers could find employees easily who have good technical knowledge about the job. What about soft skills? Basically, employers want to hire someone who can adapt and handle multiple situations. The best way of showing your soft skills is using the STAR method to assess your behaviour and see if you have the right soft skills to be successful.
Employers want to see your soft skills such as mainly Communication, Organization, Teamwork Skills, Punctuality, Critical Thinking, Creativity, Collaboration, Adaptability etc.
What Is the STAR Method?
Situation: Give context about a situation you faced in the workplace and what led to the situation unfolding.
Task: Show your involvement in the situation.
Action: Explain how you acted in this situation and how it affected your mindset toward accomplishing your goal.
Result: Highlight the outcome of your actions and the way your behaviour led to the outcome. Use quantifiable statistics to underscore how your actions helped your previous employer.
Here are the Most Common Interview Questions and How to answer
1. Tell Me About Yourself
This first question seems simple, so many people fail to prepare for it, but it’s crucial. Don’t give your complete employment journey or personal history. Your concise and compelling speech shows exactly why you’re the right fit for the job. Talk a little bit about your current role then give some background as to how you got there and experience you have that’s relevant. Finally, explain why you want this role.
2. Tell Me About a Time You Demonstrated Leadership Skills
Your interviewer might toss out a question like this one to not only understand how you inspire others to get behind you, but also how you navigate through challenging circumstances. Make sure you pick a scenario that actually was both challenging and meaningful and then provide two or three tactical things you did to navigate your team through it.
3. Tell me about a time you worked with a difficult person
Employers want to see how much of a “team player” you really are. Make sure that you don’t spend so much time focused on the conflict. Give the information about what you did to make the situation better.
4. How do you explain new topics to co-workers unfamiliar with them?
Employers ask questions associated with your communication skills to conclude how well you interact with co-workers. Give a situation where you introduced a new subject and describe how you’d use your communication skills going forward. You just need to be able to describe a tactic or two that you used to make your message easier to understand.
5. Tell me about a time you had to handle pressure
Employers aren’t looking for people who crumble under the sometimes-standard pressures at work. They want candidates who can roll with the punches and adapt quickly, and that’s exactly what this question is getting at. If you can draw attention to not only how you coped with unexpected changes, but also how you used those shifting circumstances to bounce back even better than before.
6. What are the three most important things to you in a job?
Diversity of thought is important for a team’s success. Employers want to work with people who have different abilities and they don’t want to hire the clone employee. For this reason, don’t give them the same answers. Instead, employers want to hire candidates who have personality and make a valuable contribution to their business and culture.
7. How do you prioritize your tasks when you have multiple deadlines to meet?
Employers want to feel confident that if those things happen you know how to successfully prioritize, organize, and manage your own time and workload when. Don’t tell them about how your current or previous employer repeatedly overworked you. Instead, explain to them how you stay focused and do positive things you did to take control of your own to-do list to your goal.
