Great Answers to Tough Interview Questions

Your Comprehensive Job Search Guide with over 200 Practice Interview Questions

Martin John Yate

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789666939
• Edition: 11
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Great Answers to Tough Interview Questions is the essential companion for all jobseekers. With over 5 million copies sold, this bestseller 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? Now in its 11th edition, Great Answers to Tough Interview Questions 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.

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 economic climate.

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.

There are two reasons jobs exist. First, as I’ve said, every job is a small but important cog in the organization’s complex money-making machine; it exists to help the company make money. Second, the company hasn’t been able to automate that job out of existence because in your area of technical expertise, problems arise.

Consequently, the company hires someone who has the technical skills to solve the problems that typically occur within an area of specific expertise. The company hopes to hire someone who knows the territory well enough to predict and prevent many of these problems from arising in the first place.

It doesn’t matter what your job title is, you are always hired to be a problem solver with a specific area of expertise. Think about the nuts and bolts of any job you’ve held. At its heart, that job is chiefly concerned with the anticipation, identification, prevention and solution of problems. This enables the company to make money, as quickly, efficiently, and reliably as possible.

These aren’t the only factors that are critical to your success and that all jobs have in common. In the next chapter, you’ll learn about a specific set of transferable skills and professional values that all employers are anxious to find in candidates, whom they then hire and promote just as quickly as they can find them.

2

TRANSFERABLE SKILLS AND PROFESSIONAL VALUES

Understand what your customers want to buy.

There are certain keywords you see in almost every job posting that relate to skills: communication, multitasking, teamwork, creativity, analytical thinking, leadership, determination, productivity, motivation and a few more we’ll discuss shortly. These words represent a secret language that few job hunters ever show they understand. The ones who do ‘get it’ are also the ones who get the job offers.

That is because, as discussed in the previous chapter, these keywords and phrases represent the skills that enable you to do your job well, whatever that job may be. They are known as transferable skills and professional values because no matter what the job, the profession or the elevation of that job, these skills and values make the difference between success and failure.

The professional everyone wants to work with

There is a specific set of transferable skills a...