Preparing for your next interview

Congratulations! You’ve successfully navigated your way through the application process for a new position, and landed an interview. Your cover letter got them interested to read your resume, and your resume got the interview, but you need to cross the “finish line” in the interview.

Before you interview for a new position, you need to prepare. You can’t just “walk” into an interview without preparation and expect to do well. You should do your homework to determine what questions they are likely to ask.

Most hiring managers are looking to answer four basic questions in an interview:

1. Do you want the job?
2. Can you do the job?
3. Do I want to work with you?
4. Can you learn as you go?

In my experience working with hiring managers, the first question on the list is usually the first question they ask in an interview. This will likely be a simple, straightforward question like “What interested you about the position?” For this question, you should be up front and honest; what do you find fascinating about the role, and why did you apply for it?

Most of the questions you’ll be asked during the rest of the interview will focus on the second question. It’s rare that you’ll get asked questions that directly inquire about the last two items; instead, interviewers will infer from how you compose yourself during the interview if they think you’ll be a good co-worker (“fit”). They will also assume from other answers if you can learn on the job.

So when you do your homework before an interview, the most important will likely be questions around “can you do the job?” Let’s focus there.

Can you do the job?

A good interviewer will ask experience-based questions. That’s the method I recommend to my clients when I provide coaching on interviewing and hiring. An example of an experience-based question is “Tell me about a time when..” and they’ll ask you to discuss some previous project you worked on. How you worked in the past is a pretty good indicator for what you’ll be like in the future.

For example, an interviewer might highlight a project from your resume, and ask “I see you did [achievement] on your resume. Tell me about that.” Or they might draw on something that’s common in any work environment, like “Tell me about a time when you had to rush to deliver a project that was on a tight deadline.” In either case, you’ll answer the question in the same way.

Stories are powerful, and I encourage you to tell a story during your answer. A great structure to use in answering an interview question is STAR+R, where you discuss the Situation, Target, Actions, Results, plus Reflections:

Situation : What was the problem you had to solve?

Target : What did you need to do? What was the goal?

Actions : What did you do to get there?

Results : What was the outcome?

+Reflection : What did you learn?

This provides a very natural flow to the story, and describes events in chronological order. For example, you could answer this question like this:

“Well, we had (Situation) and things were really broken. I realized we needed to (Target) so I got together with (these people and teams) and we worked on (Actions) for the next few weeks. At the end, we had (Results). It was a great project! I learned (Reflections).”

That’s a great answer and describes your experience well. It provides a brief context up front with the Situation, then identifies what target you needed to reach. You don’t need to go into a lot of detail with Situation and Target; these might be very specific to that organization, and it will take too much time to fully explain the background for the hiring manager.

Instead, just provide an overview for what was going on and what you needed to do, and the interviewer will fill in the details on their own. For example, you might say “This was in 2008 and we had an old microVAX system” (Situation) and “we needed to replace it with a new system” (Target). You don’t need to go into detail about why the organization still ran a VAX in 2008, saying you had it is enough. If the interviewer feels they need to know the background, they’ll ask. But more likely, they don’t - hiring managers tend not to ask for a lot of “inside” information about other organizations.

Another sample STAR+R answer might be something like this:

“We were working on (Situation) and my boss asked me to (Target) in two weeks. So I worked with (people or team) and we (Actions). And in two weeks, we were able to (Results). It was a tough project because (Reflections) but we got it done.”

Again, this starts with a brief Situation and Target. Spend the most time on Actions. What happened? What work did you do to make things better? How did you collaborate with others to get it done? What was the timeline of events? What was the deliverable?

Your description of Results can be somewhat brief, depending on the project. But remember to make a connection between your Results and the Target you mentioned earlier. For example, if the Target was to create content for a new website in two weeks, your Results should say something like “..and after those two weeks, we had built the website.” You might also share how significant this achievement was, like “We had over 30,000 views of each ‘explainer’ article in the first week, and over a half-million total views the week after that.”

You don’t always have to provide Reflections for every answer, but it helps. Be prepared if your interviewer asks a follow-up question that prompts you to reflect on your project. That follow-up question might be simply “And what did you learn?” or “And did you like working on that project?” That’s a great opportunity to leverage Reflections: “It was a great project because I learned a lot about how to manage projects with people who didn’t report directly under me” or “That was a challenging project to work on because not everyone was on board, especially the senior leadership - I would want to make sure I had better cross-organizational support next time, for a similar project.”

“Yes/no” interview questions

Unfortunately, not all interviewers know how to ask open-ended questions like “Tell me about a time when..” Some hiring managers just haven’t learned that skill. Instead, they might ask a more “closed” question instead, like “Did you ever have to deliver a project quickly?” or “Have you ever had to work with someone who was difficult?” These are both “yes/no” questions, and you could answer either with “Yes, of course I did” or “Yes, everyone has” but that’s not very helpful for an interview.

Turn these questions into a STAR+R answer by telling a story. You should practice this transition for your next interview, so you don’t have to figure it out during the interview. For example, this is one way you might answer “Did you ever have to work on a tight timeline?”

“Oh yes, we had a lot of tight turnarounds. One time, we had (Situation) and we had to (Target) in a week. I mapped out a work plan with my team, and over that week we (Actions). And yes, we had (Results) after that week. That was a tough one because (Reflections) but I’m glad we got it done.”

Related to the “yes/no” question is the “what-if” question. That’s where the interviewer asks about a hypothetical future example, such as “What if you had to work with a difficult person on a project?” Fortunately, these are easy to turn around into a STAR+R answer. And providing an example of previous experience is more interesting than describing some fuzzy future case, anyway:

“Yes, I think we’ve all had that one person that just didn’t get along. Once, I was working on (Situation) and we needed to get to (Target). This other person was assigned as the expert, and was a real pain to work with because (reasons, but be brief, don’t push someone”under the bus”). But we (Actions) and were able to (Results). I made it work with that person by (Reflections).”

Awkward interview questions

In the 1980s, a certain book became popular because it espoused a “different” way of thinking about interviews. Microsoft didn’t write it, but the book became popular in certain technology circles because Microsoft followed the book throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The interview questions were completely off-the-wall, asking questions like “Why is a manhole cover round?” or “Why is a barn red?” The idea was that most people just don’t think about things like that, and the interviewer wants to catch candidates “off guard” to see their thought process as they work out an answer to an oddball topic.

I thought this interview style had died out in the mid 2000s, but apparently it just went dormant. More recently, some companies have resurrected these weird interview questions, asking candidates “If you could be any animal, what would it be?” or “Who would play you in a movie about your life?” One interviewer I coached liked to ask “What book are you reading right now?” - and while the question never yielded good answers, the hiring manager kept using it.

Unfortunately, there is no good answer to a question like this. Some interviewers seem to have learned about these questions long ago, and thought they were interesting or “cool,” and never let go. My advice is to do the best you can and move on to the next question. It’s okay to take a minute by starting with “That’s a good one, let me think about that for a second,” and then come up with a smart but safe answer. Provide some justification for your answer, but don’t get too worked up over it; hopefully, the next question the interviewer asks will be a more typical experience-based question.

You’re ready for it

Preparing for your next interview can be nerve-wracking, but if you learn to leverage STAR+R answers, you will be better positioned to describe your experience. Stories matter, and the STAR+R story structure provides a framework that allows you to tell a story in a compelling way. And hopefully, that will help you to nail the interview and get the job.