The job interview is mostly the last milestone before signing a job contract. The written application was convincing, and now they want to get to know the applicants better. Accordingly, recruiters or HR personnel have a lot of questions.
About the way applicants work, their soft skills and their personality. There are many interview questions – questions about strengths and weaknesses, about motivation, even stress questions and trick questions.
Interview questions are enormously varied: Why should we hire you? What makes you different from others? How do you motivate yourself?. Behind this, there are different types of questions and questioning techniques with the goal of learning more about applicants and their personalities.
Very few personnel managers mean any harm when they ask difficult job interview questions. Such application questions should rather be considered as a signal to take a look behind the facade. Applicants may appear too perfect. That’s why they want to lure them, tickle them and provoke them.
The interview process is arguably one of the most important parts of recruiting, as it determines whether or not a candidate is a good fit for a position. It’s up to the recruiters to come up with the perfect questions that will help both get to know each other and challenge the potential candidate. In the following there is a list of the 20 best and most common interview questions.
26 Job interview questions
Interview questions might be divided into topics such as questions about the company and vacant position, professional and life experience, motivation or psychological questions. Most of which are standard questions and can be practiced by the candidates in advance.
Best answers do not exist. Best answers are authentic, do not appear too standard or copied from the internet. Recruiters want to see individuality and who the applicant is. Often, candidates make the mistake to appear too perfect in interviews and have prepared and perfect answers.
Interview questions about the company or position to be filled:
- What appealed to you most about our job posting?
- How did you hear about us?
- What do you know about our products?
- What do you know about our company?
Interview questions about motivation for applying:
- Why do you want to change jobs?
- What are your salary expectations?
- What is important to you in an employer?
- What challenges do you expect?
Job Interview Personal questions:
- What are your weaknesses?
- What are your strengths?
- Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
- What would your (former) colleagues say about you?
Interview questions about qualifications:
- Which programs have you worked with so far?
- What relevant qualities/skills do you bring to this job?
- What benefits do you bring to our company?
- Why should we hire you of all people?
Soft skill questions:
- Are you a team player?
- Have you had difficulties with colleagues in the past?
- What is more important to you: a good working atmosphere or good results?
Also unpleasant questions are possible:
- Why is there no reference from your last work station?
6 Job Interviews questions in the IT sector
Of course, job interview questions in the IT sector are much more specific and detailed. The interview with an IT consultant will be aimed at finding out if he or she has expertise and is psychologically adept at performing and selling IT services. In order to successfully pass an interview for the position of an IT Consultant, applicants should be well prepared for answering very job specific questions. Although they are also asked common interview questions, IT interview questions will be a priority.
IT consultants excel at expertise that clients don’t have. Using these skills skillfully requires two things: First, deep-seated expertise that you can abstract from. Second, empathy for the customer. Consultants must understand the customer and break down their expertise to the customer’s needs.
The super expert who lives in his specialist world and becomes impatient when the counterpart expresses problems of understanding is not convincing. Applicants must convince by demonstrating their will and capability to efficiently solve and offer IT services.
Some specific IT interview questions
How do you imagine your everyday life as an IT consultant in our company?
Here nobody is expected to explain exactly how the processes work in this company. At this point, the applicant can spread his or her knowledge about the company, which he or she should have acquired in advance from publicly available sources. The candidate may talk about project monitoring, communication processes, preparation and follow-up of meetings, accounting, personnel planning and research.
What do you do when you get stuck on a programming project?
IT consultant should have the ability to analyze things in a detached way. What was the starting point, what happened, where is the project today? Were the customer’s requirements formulated correctly? Were sufficient resources available? Was there a lack of communication?
How would you represent the functions of a microwave as a process diagram?
Two skills of an IT consultant are required here: a quick understanding and the ability to break problems down to process issues.
What are the biggest challenges to an IT infrastructure?
This question in the interview for IT consultants asks for expertise. An experienced IT consultant is familiar with the technical details, what is relevant is the conflict of objectives between technical requirements and the customer’s budget expectations.
As an IT consultant, how do you organize collaboration with external service providers?
Different disciplines come together in IT projects. As IT consultants, they have to get existing and new service providers to work together, organize processes, monitor interim results and control costs. Companies want to get the best quality at the lowest cost. Applicants will be valued as an IT consultant if they are able to achieve this goal.
As a team leader, how would you approach the creation of a new software application?
This IT interview question allows applicants to demonstrate overall expertise as an IT specialist.
In IT, knowledge is power. In IT, soft skills are important but rather in the background. Different to many other sectors, IT specialists specially need to prove their hard skills. They are very much oriented in problem solving. This does not mean that soft skills are not important, especially when it comes to a position as a project manager or team leader, for example. However, IT professionals need to be able to perform their technical job first and foremost in order to be able to then take on cross-functional tasks.
