Interviewing with Confidence 

We often think about how stressful interviews are for the candidate but they are also challenging for hiring managers. 

First, the decision of whether to hire someone or not is high stakes – it’s a serious relationship after all.

Second, many hiring managers don’t actually have a lot of training in how to conduct strong interviews. They’ve probably received an overview of illegal interview questions from someone but I’ve spoken to hiring managers who haven’t received any advice around best questions to ask or how to assess whether someone is a good candidate for the role. 

In the past, managers have turned to Google or a great book called High-Impact Interview Questions (recommended to me by a hiring manager when we were chatting about being bored with our current questions).

Now, of course, ChatGPT is picking up the slack. I’ve talked before about the limits of using AI in a job search but AI is actually helpful at developing interview questions. There’s enough standardization in the form and content that it does a great job creating a solid question. You can still add some additional context to your prompts to get really fantastic questions (or zero in on the ones you might struggle with), but these days it’s really easy to create personalized interview question lists. 

Even with all these tools, I still talk to edskippers who have gone to an interview and gotten some really boring questions: “How do you stay organized?” “What’s your biggest professional weakness? … strength?” Sometimes these can even be the hardest to answer because you’ve prepared for very different, often better, questions. 

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to focus on the broad categories of interviews and recommend strategies to predict interview questions as well as prepare for them most effectively. Most of the questions I share below are ones I’ve asked (or heard asked) in interviews or questions that have been shared with me by edskippers from their interviews. When you’re well prepared, you’re much more likely to communicate your value effectively but you also can confidently explain your value. 

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