Page 32 - 301 Best Questions to Ask on Your Interview, Second Edition

W H Y YOU H AV E TO QU E ST ION

Well, the situation I’ve just described is your next job interview.
It’s a presentation. The agenda: your future at the company. In the
audience: the senior decision makers required to authorize offering
you a position. Everyone is looking at you to shine. Now, given the
stakes, are you willing to wing it? If you’re comfortable with working
like that, there’s little need to read further.

Some applicants believe that spontaneity can make up for lack
of strategic planning. But spontaneity, in cases such as this, can be
indistinguishable from laziness and lack of preparation. Interview-
ers, professionals themselves, really want you to prepare for the
interview as they did. Preparation is professionalism in action. It’s
common sense. It’s courtesy. It works.

WRITE YOUR QUESTIONS DOWN

You’ve secured a job interview. Great. The first thing you do is home-
work (see Chapter 4 for a discussion on researching the company).
The second thing you do is write down the questions you will ask.

Some job seekers are uncertain about whether they should write
down their questions. If they do, should they bring them to the inter-
view? The answer to both questions is yes. Doesn’t that look, well,
premeditated? Of course it does. That’s the effect you want. See
Chapter 5 for a fuller discussion of the issues around taking notes.

Writing down your questions accomplishes a number of useful
objectives.

• It helps articulate your thoughts. Your questions should be as
crisp as your shirt or blouse. Write them down, practice reading
them aloud, and edit until the questions sing.

• It helps prioritize your issues. Not every question carries equal
weight. But only when you write them all down can you decide which
question to ask first. Some candidates write questions on index cards
so they can easily order and reorder them until they have the flow
they want before transferring them to a notebook.

• It helps you remember. In the anxiety of the interview, you can
easily forget a question you meant to ask. Or worse, your brain can

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