Page 19 - 301 Best Questions to Ask on Your Interview, Second Edition

I N T RO DUC T ION

ity to “close the sale,” a critical requirement that any sales manager
demands in candidates for sales positions.

QUESTIONS TO DIFFERENTIATE YOURSELF

Interviewers today want to see immediate evidence that you are
action-oriented, engaged for the long term, committed, and curious.
These are the attributes that will get you a job. If you act passive,
disengaged, self-centered, and apathetic, you’ll be passed over. Your
ability to ask meaningful questions will inform the interviewer about
whether you project the first set of attributes or the latter.

Organizations have beefed up the entire employee selection pro-
cess to weed out amateurs, impostors, and other wanna-bes. The job
interview has received more than its share of attention as a critical
vehicle to achieve organizational goals. If you have been interview-
ing, you know that employers have developed dramatically more
sophisticated interviewing and selection techniques. You see evi-
dence of these developments in every aspect of the selection process,
from the job interview to exhaustive background checks.

Many job hunters think their primary goal is to get to the job
interview. Wrong! If you think the primary goal of the job hunter is
to get a job offer, you are getting warmer, but you are still a day late
and a dollar short. In reality, the primary goal of the job hunter is to
get an offer for a job that is a good fit with his or her short- and long-
term requirements.

To ground the book in reality, I’ve asked hundreds of recruiters,
job coaches, and hiring managers for the most memorably good and
bad questions they have heard from job candidates. Some of these
questions are brilliant in their insight, depth, and elegance. Others
are just as effective in terminating the interview with extreme preju-
dice. Whether the questions are memorably good or memorably bad,
you can learn from the former and avoid the latter. The best of these
memorable questions, with comments from the recruiters, are pep-
pered throughout the book.

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