a FRESH approach to answering stale interview questions.
If you go on enough interviews, you are inevitably going to run into one of those banal questions everybody dreads:
Overused and underwhelming! These questions are problematic for several reasons. For one thing, they don't do much to bring out your specific qualifications as applicable to the role. Furthermore, because they tend to be open-ended, they are not very quantifiable. Thus, when all the candidates are being compared, it can't be apples-to-apples because there is no common standard against which to measure. Seriously....
There is no objective way to do it. The bigger problem, however, is that these kinds of stale questions are indicative of issues with the interview process itself. If you find yourself on the receiving end of one of these cliched classics, you've got yourself an interviewer who is one of three things: inexperienced, unprepared or just plain ignorant of best practices. And therein lies your opportunity!
That's your chance to go for the jugular and seize that opportunity....
Your first priority is to tease out which of the three categories your interviewer falls into. The inexperienced interviewer is not hard to spot. Some of their tells are that they tend to be younger rather than older, they are over reliant on props like a list of prepared questions, they don't ask good follow-up questions that deviate from the script and, this is the big one, they talk too much. Inexperienced interviewers will often spend more of the interview talking than the job seeker.
If you find yourself fielding a cliched question from an inexperienced interviewer, that's good news for you because you can dazzle them with your wisdom and experience. Take that mushy, open-ended question and bat it back with a crisp, quantifiable response drawn from your experience. "I can't predict where I'll be in five years except in broad terms, but let me tell you about where I was five years ago, and how I progressed my career to this point." BOOM! That's a meaty conversation to have and one that is far more illustrative of your abilities than making guesses about the future. Alternatively, if you don't have much experience yourself, you can commiserate with your interviewer over how hard it is to know what you want to do, and how you're both still trying to find your way.
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Small side note of wisdom: Inexperienced interviewers are not hard to impress.
If your interviewer is experienced but unprepared, you'll know because they'll inquire about basic information they should already know about you. E.g., they will ask you questions about your education or experience that are plainly stated on your resume (which they obviously did not read closely). Or they may appear distracted or (this is a sure sign) they will take a call during the interview.
Unprepared interviewers are in one of two camps, the very busy (so busy they will interrupt your interview to take a call) and the very lazy. Your default assumption should be that they were too busy to prepare. Especially if you're sitting across a VP Sales or of similar seniority. Time is ticking and time is money. This will make you empathetic to those that truly are busy, and the lazy ones will be flattered that you think they have that many demands on their time! If you suspect your interviewer is just winging it, that provides a perfect opening for you as a job seeker. Someone that busy must be in need of immediate help. That's your angle to play up. You can come in and start contributing at a high level right away to take some of the load off their overworked shoulders. The interviewer who is unprepared, for whatever reason, will recognize and appreciate the logic of your approach.
The ignorant interviewer presents a slightly different opportunity. Ignorant is not a negative word, by the way. It just means they don't yet have that particular knowledge. And while it's not recommended that you refer to your interviewer as ignorant, you can use the experience as a teaching moment for them. If asked something like "What is your greatest weakness?" you steer the answer to more fertile ground. "Well, I can be a bit of a perfectionist, but so can a lot of people. I think rather than talk about a greatest weakness, I'd like to tell you how I take on board feedback about any of my shortcomings so I can improve myself...". BOOOM!
And if they ask about the turnips in Norway, you can say something like, "I don't know, but it sounds like you're interested in my thought process. Let me take you through my general approach to problem-solving...". Suddenly, the focus falls away from one specific instance of a problem to a generalized discussion about issue resolution. Which is what truly matters to the interviewer, whether they realize it or not. They come out of the interview more knowledgeable about you than they would have otherwise thanks to your patient teaching.
Cliched questions are problematic not just because they don't contribute much to the conversation, but because they indicate you're in a sub-optimal interview process. Whether you have an inexperienced interviewer, or one who has not prepared well, or one who just doesn't know any better, it's actually good news for you. You can steer the conversation back to where it needs to be, which is focused on your qualifications and experience. So don't wince when an interviewer asks you "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" That can be a silly question, or it can be your opportunity to shine.