Job interviews are uncertain territory for many candidates. At the end of the day, every job interview boils down to three essential questions, explains career coach Jürgen Hesse. Those who know them can prepare themselves.
The job interview presents many applicants with a seemingly impossible task. On the one hand, you want to be optimally prepared for the interview, after all, your professional future depends on the question and answer game. On the other hand, it is impossible to come up with a perfect answer in advance to all the questions that the other person might have.
But the good news is: you don’t have to. Because unlike the vocabulary test at school, there is not one correct answer for every question that you have to memorize. “The job interview does not consist of 300 completely different questions,” says career coach Jürgen Hesse. “In principle, every job interview boils down to just three major key questions, even if they are always formulated differently.”
Question 1 in the interview: Why do you want this job?
Hesse calls these core questions the Adam and Eve questions. The most important of these questions is: Why do you want this job? Hesse estimates that around half of the questions employers ask are about the motivation of the applicant. No matter how the questions are worded in detail: Whoever can explain conclusively why the company/the industry/the activity is the logical next career step can score points here.
Why should I hire you?
The second big question flips perspective: Why should I hire you? Most recruiters won’t ask the question literally, but will try to approach it with phrases like “What do you bring to the company?” or “What do you have that others don’t?”. But also “When can you start?”, “How expensive are you?” and “What do you still have to learn?” fall into this category according to Hesse.
Who are you?
The third big question is, to put it crudely, “Who are you?” In order to find out something about the personality of the applicant, HR managers use both open questions such as “Tell us something about yourself” or “What are your strengths and weaknesses?”, but also targeted stress questions such as “What would you do in situation XY?”
Of course, any experienced interviewer can still make an applicant sweat with specific questions. But: “Once I’ve understood that these three basic questions are at stake and I’ve prepared answers to them, nothing can confuse me so quickly,” says application expert Hesse.
Note: This text was first published in 2017. We are republishing it as a service piece for current events. According to a representative Insa survey reported by the “Bild” newspaper, almost every fifth employee in Germany would like to change jobs this year.
Source: Stern
Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
