Dealing with difficult interview questions

Saturday April 2011, 00:00:00

Dealing with difficult interview questions

Interviews can be very stressful experiences for the best of us and if you are ill prepared and find ourselves unable to deal with the questions the interviewer is posing this will severely impact performance and confidence moving forward. Preparing your interview answers is as essential a part of pre interview preparation as ensuring you have ironed your interview suit!
When you initially applied for the job, you may have noticed it on one of the on line job boards, seen it in the press; you did not randomly apply for the job, you apply for a role you think that you have the qualifications and / or experience for. Therefore you have the appropriate knowledge to be able to adequately answer questions on the role. Part of your preparation for your interview should be to review the job advert, any job description or job literature you may. In any job advert the first few skills or qualities outlined in the job advert are what the employer is absolutely looking for. These are the areas you should be reviewing in your interview preparation. The employer may have sent the competencies needed for the role and you know these are also areas they are likely to ask about; therefore it would obviously be sensible to review these areas.
Many interviews are conducted as competency based interviews or use some competency based questions in a general interview. You will recognise a competency based question when the interviewer uses terms such as ‘can you tell me about a time when can you give me an example of when you;. Competency based interviews are based upon the premise that previous experience is a good indicator of future performance and therefore employers are looking for examples of previous experience of a particular situation or a evidence of a particular behaviour. The most effective way of answering (and preparing your answer) for a competency based question is to use S.T.A.R.
S; Situation ; Tell the interviewer about the situation to put the experience in context T ; Task - What was the task you had to undertake or problem you had to solve; A;Activities; What activities did you undertake to resolve the issue R ; Results ; What was the result or outcome Using STAR is useful for answering most interview questions where you are trying to demonstrate your experience or skills .
Effective methods of preparing for this interview are by making a mind map; taking the area of experience or the skill as your centre and mapping out all the areas of experience you can think of that demonstrate this. Another effective method is to mak;aid memoire outlining all the areas of knowledge and experience you are likely to be asked about and putting them down one side of a page and then using two or three examples of how you can demonstrate this across the page ; in a table format. You should use only one or two words in your finished document to aid your memory and then you can take this along to your interview if necessary. In most cases the very fact that you have undertaken this exercise is generally enough as you have done your ‘revision’! It is important to think of a couple of examples for each potential area of questioning as not every example fits every question. If you find that even with preparation you panic and your mind goes blank a good tip is to repeat the question back to the interviewer to give yourself another 10 seconds or so to formulate an answer in your head. For example;ok so an example of..... would be; If however, you just don't understand the question, ask! It may well be the interviewer who has asked a badly worded question and as long as you are not asking at every question, thats alright.
If you have had difficult questions in previous interviews, write them down and work out what your answer would be now; practice! Ask others if they have had any other particularly difficult questions and work out your answer beforehand. Practice and preparation is the key to a good interview.

Remember you were invited you along for the interview because they believe you can do the job based on your CV or application form and they want you to do well as they want to fill their vacancy. Good Luck!
Lesley Malcolm, Director, Clearwater Brookes Ltd, 0141 582 1474 Clearwater Brookes are a Human Resources and Training and Development organisation that specialises in management development, leadership, employee development and executive coaching .