Great Answers to Tough Interview Questions

Martin John Yate

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780749481421
• eBook ISBN:
  9780749481438
• Edition: 10
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Great Answers to Tough Interview Questions is the essential companion for all job-seekers. Having sold over 5 million copies, this book includes over 200 interview questions with expert tips on how to answer them. One of the bestselling job-hunting books of all time, Great Answers to Tough Interview Questions takes you through the whole process; from composing your CV and preparing for interviews to interview techniques, answering tough questions and even negotiating your new salary. Crammed full of the difficult questions that interviewers might throw at you, Martin John Yate gives you expert tips and suggested answers to tackle the tricky ones including:Why should I give you the job? What is your biggest weakness? What are your salary expectations? How long would you stay with the company? What is your greatest strength? Why do you want to work here? Great Answers to Tough Interview Questions will help anyone at any stage of their career. It is your indispensable guide to blowing away the competition and landing your dream job.

PART ONE

THE WELL-STOCKED BRIEFCASE

This section will show you how to discover, define and package your skills, and put together a comprehensive plan of attack that uses all the most effective job search techniques.

Once upon a time, in a town plagued by bears, there lived a man. The man had always wanted to travel but had neither the right job nor the money to do so. If he could kill a bear, he thought, then he could travel to other places plagued with bears and make his living as a bear-slayer. Every day he sat on the porch and waited for a bear to come by. After many weeks of waiting, he thought he might go looking for bears. He didn’t know much about them, except that they were out there.

Full of hope, he loaded his single-shot musket and headed for the forest. On reaching the edge of the forest, he raised the musket and fired into the dense undergrowth.

Do you think he hit a bear or, for that matter, anything else? Our hero went hunting unprepared and got what he deserved. The moral of the tale is this: when you go bear or job hunting, keep a grip on reality and don’t go off half-cocked.

Out there in the forest of the professional world are countless opportunities. Even in times of severe economic downturn – and remember, they are cyclical and likely to occur every seven to ten years throughout your career – there are always jobs out there. Yes, they are harder to find; and yes, the competition is tougher, but someone is going to land those job offers. It can be you.

All companies are in business to make money, but things go wrong so they hire problem-solvers to fix things. This is an important life lesson. Think about your present job. You were hired to cope with certain problems within your area of expertise, to anticipate and prevent them from arising and, where they cannot be prevented, to solve them. Everyone in every profession and at every level, is paid to be a problem-solver. There are three lessons you should remember on this score:

• Lesson 1: Companies are in business to make money; they have loyalty only to the bottom line. They make money through sales and by being efficient and saving time. If they save time, they save money, so have more time to make more money. We call this productivity.
• Lesson 2: Companies and you are exactly alike. You both want to make as much money as possible in as short a time as possible. Think efficient systems and procedures, and multitasking (time management and organization). Think of focus and goal, not task and activity.
• Lesson 3: There are buyer’s markets (advantage: employer) and there are seller’s markets (advantage: employee). Job offers put you in a seller’s market and give you the upper hand.

Lesson 1 tells you the three things every company is interested in. Lesson 2 teaches you to recognize that you really have the same goals as the company. Lesson 3 reminds you that anyone with any sense wants to be in a seller’s market.

If you look for jobs one at a time, you put yourself in a buyer’s market. If you implement my advice in this book, you will have multiple job offers (even in a tough economy) and put yourself in a seller’s market, regardless of the economy climate.

This means making sure MeLtd is ready with a properly packaged product and an integrated sales process.

In this first part of the book you will:

• Learn to evaluate market needs and package your professional skills for those needs.
• Discover how to identify companies in your target location that could be in need of your services.
• Get connected to the most influential people in your profession so that you’ll have personal introductions at many prospective companies.
• Implement an integrated job search plan of attack.

While I will cover each of these areas in sequence, I recommend that you mix and match the activities. In other words, when working on your CV starts to drive you nuts, switch to researching your target market or building your professional networks. An hour of one activity followed by an hour of another will keep your mind fresh and your programme balanced.

1

THE REALITIES OF JOB HUNTING

A job search isn’t nanotechnology; you’ll find a common-sense logic in everything I show you and wonder why you didn’t see it before. You can get your job search moving onto a new trajectory this week, and reap the rewards for the rest of your career. You can do this.

Everyone feels unsure when they are looking for a job – you aren’t the only one – but while there used to be a stigma about looking for a job, times have changed. Job change is an integral part of modern life. It comes around about every four years, making change and job search a constant factor for everyone.

Because everyone understands this, once you organize and follow the plan of attack, you will find many, many people are ready to give you a helping hand if they can.

We live and work in a time of immense change. When you were born, there still existed a world in which hard work, dedication, and sacrifice led to long-term job security and a steady, predictable climb up the ladder of success. The world you now work in is entirely different. Companies still expect hard work, dedication and sacrifice, but their only loyalty is to the profit imperative. You are expendable.

Different times require different strategies; you need a new mindset for today’s job search and for your long-term career success. The job security and professional growth our parents expected is a thing of the past. Here are the realities you’re facing, expressed in numbers:

50–4–3–7–10

A 50-year work life

Job change about every 4 years

3 or more distinct careers

Economic downturns every 7–10 years

Changing careers at the same time as you change jobs adds another level of complexity to the process because you are leaving behind many of the skills that usually help you land that new job.

How business works

Companies exist to make money, as quickly, efficiently and reliably as possible. They make money by selling a product or service, and they prosper by becoming better and more efficient at it. When a company saves time, it saves money, and then has more time to make more money; this is called productivity.

If a company can make money without employees, it will do so, because that means more money for the owners. Unfortunately for the owners, a company requires a complex machinery to deliver those products and services that bring in revenue. You can think of any and every job as a small but important cog in this complex money-making machine, and every cog has to be oiled and maintained; this costs money. If the company can redesign its machinery to do without that cog (automation) or can find a cheaper cog (outsourcing that job to Mumbai), of course it is going to do so....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE The Well-Stocked Briefcase
• PART TWO Getting to Square One
• PART THREE Great Answers to Tough Interview Questions
• PART FOUR Finishing Touches
• Index of questions
• Index
• Backcover