Objectives of an interview
A recruiter will be evaluating you from all angles, so it is good to prepare well in advance. And the very first step is to find out what the recruiters pay attention to.
Those who have been to more than one interview certainly noticed that the quality and execution of interviews varies significantly. Sometimes you are with one person, sometimes you are joined by a potential supervisor or another team member. You can experience an individual interview, a group interview, or even an assessment centre. Some recruiters follow prepared questions and conduct a structured interview, other rely more on their intuition and ask about what comes to mind.
Regardless of the approach, the questions will always focus on three key areas: competence, motivation and personality.
Competencies
Competencies can be defined as a set of knowledge, skills and abilities that are manifested in our thinking and behaviour. Each competence can be described by different typical manifestations.
Soft skills
Some competences are generally applicable to work ethic, interpersonal relationships, communication and personal development. We call these competences soft skills, and they include, for example, empathy, creativity, flexibility, teamwork, proactivity and time management.
Soft skills are relatively difficult to measure and are hard to assess in a short time allocated for an interview.
Hard-skills
Hard skills are the opposite of soft skills. They usually relate to specific education, training or work experience, and unlike soft skills are relatively easy to determine. Examples include language skills, computer skills (excel, programming languages, other tools and technologies), technical skills and much more.
Specific hard skills tend to relate to specific professions, for example knowledge of the law for lawyers. In contrast, soft skills are usually more universal and transferable across different fields.
Competence and the interview
The specific competences that can be the subject of and tested in an interview can usually be identified very easily. All important information can be found in the job advertisement. Let’s look at an example and figure out what competences will be evaluated during the interview.
Soft skills are marked with blue colour, hard skills with orange colour. These will most likely be the focus of the interview.
Here are some examples:
- "Knowledge of common psychometric tools":
Which psychometric tools do you think are appropriate in this career field? What psychometric tools have you worked with in the past? When is it appropriate to use The Bochum Inventory of Personal Work Features?
- "Time-management":How would your friends or acquaintances rate your time-management? Describe a situation in which you showed good time-management. How do you manage your time? Do you use any planning tools?
Evaluating competences
There are numbers of ways recruiter can evaluate candidate’s competencies. The most common approach is asking questions.
Types of questions used to evaluate competences:
A) Technical questions: These are relatively straightforward questions designed to evaluate the level of your competences.
Examples:
- Can you describe your knowledge and experience in marketing?
- Which data analytics tools do you have experience with?
- How would you create a contingency table in Excel?
B) Behavioural questions: These are focused on your past and meant to ascertain your future behaviour. These are easy to recognize, as you are usually asked to describe a situation from your past.
Examples:
- Describe a situation where you worked in a team or on a team project.
- Tell us about a situation in which something went wrong. What was it? How did you handle the situation?
- Can you give me an example of how you handled conflict in the workplace?
C) Situational questions: These are in some way similar to behavioural questions, the difference being that you are not asked to describe a situation from your past, but are presented with a hypothetical scenario, and your task is to describe how you would handle it.
Examples:
- Imagine you’re finishing a long term project and you’ve just discovered that your colleague still hasn’t turned in his part of the assignment. The deadline is approaching and without the missing part, whole project is in jeopardy. What would you do in such situation?
- How would you act if you noticed a conflict between two members of your team?
- What would you do if you received a customer complaint about the quality of a product?
In addition to the traditional oral questions, competencies can be evaluated in other forms.
Examples:
- An exam testing your knowledge
- Practical skill test (in a form of a homework, or an on-site task)
- Presentation
- Model situation
- Role play (e.g. supervisor vs. subordinate, customer vs. employee)
motivation
Motivation tends to be generally a big topic in interviews. However, motivation is a broad term, so let’s try to narrow it down first. We won’t discuss motivation as personality trait, which can manifest, for example, as motivation to perform or overcome obstacles and so on. Our sole focus is motivation to work in a given position in a particular company.
Before a company hires a new employee, it asks itself whether it is a person who will enjoy working for them, will appreciate the team, will have the desire to improve and won’t start looking for a new job in a few months.
There are numerous ways to evaluate one’s motivation. One of them is evaluating your CV and cover letter – for example, just the preparation of your CV and cover letter can say a lot about your motivation. If you don’t want to underestimate this part, take a look at our previous online courses.
The main part of evaluating one’s motivations comes up at the interview, for which recruiters have several questions in store. These questions can include:
- Why are you applying for this position? What attracted you to the position?
- What attracted you to our company?
- Why would you like to work for us?
- What are your career goals? In what ways will this position help you achieve these goals?
- What type of activities do you like to do at work? What activities you don’t enjoy?
Task
We certainly did not manage to cover all questions used to evaluate one’s motivation, so try to stop for a moment and think of at least two more questions that a recruiter can use in an interview to find out your motivation behind your choice of a company.
personality
The evaluation of candidate’s personality is the most subjective part of the interview, as the recruiters are trying to find out if you are someone they would like to work with and if you fit in their team and company culture.
Your personality is assessed throughout the whole selection process. Recruiters form their first impression based on your CB, and confirm their assumptions before, during and after the interview. They may notice how you present yourself, how well you communicate or how you talk about your previous work experiences.
In addition, you may encounter questions that intentionally seek to find out more about certain aspects of your personality.
Example:
- What are your strengths?
- How would your former colleagues describe you?
- How do you react to failure?
- How do you accept criticism?
- Do you prefer to work in a team or independently?
- What are your work-related values?
- What aspects of a job are important for you?
Task
As mentioned before, there are many situations in which your personality can come out during the selection process. One of the examples can be your arrival to the job interview. Did you arrive on time? If you didn’t, did you let the recruiter know in advance? How did you behave when you arrived at the office?
Now try to think of ways in which personality can come out in these parts of the selection process:
- Arranging an interview date:
- The conclusion of the interview (ending the meeting and leaving the office):
- Presentation of the job by the recruiter and space for questions from the candidate: