How to predict your interview questions
The biggest thing that scares interviewees is the not knowing what questions to expect in the interview. Everyone is afraid they’ll be in an interview and not have an answer prepared for one of the questions.
There are so many potential interview questions you could be asked. How can you possibly know which ones to prepare for?
The first step in interview preparation is making a list of what questions you’ll be asked. How you can do that since the interviewer isn’t going to tell you ahead of time?
It’s actually pretty easy to predict the questions you’ll be asked, and I’m going to explain it to you. If you use this method, you still might get some questions you haven’t prepared for, but there shouldn’t be too many surprises.
How to create a list of the questions you’ll get in your interview
1. Use the job title
The first way to find clues as to what questions they’ll ask you is to look at the job title. The job title, and what you know about the job responsibilities for that job, will give you an idea of the themes of the questions and many of the exact questions.
For example, if you’re applying for a managerial job, like Engineering Manager, the questions will ask things like, "Tell me about a time when you had to give someone feedback on their performance" or "Give me an example of when you mentored someone." I don’t need to see the exact job description to predict these because I know that giving performance feedback and mentoring are two things that managers need to do. This doesn’t mean you won’t be asked questions about other topics too, but you’ll definitely be asked about hiring, managing performance, developing careers, and so on, because these are core skills for managers.
You know that the Engineering Manager candidates will also get questions about the technical side of their role too, because technical knowledge is part of what it takes to be qualified for this job. They’ll have to work with other engineering teams toward larger engineering goals and hold their team accountable, review and select technical vendors, set standards for best practices around coding, and/or set mechanics for how code is deployed.
When you think about the job title for the job you want, what do you know about it that might suggest topics for you? If you’re applying for the job, you must have a pretty good idea of what skills it requires. These are the types of things interviewers might ask you about. Use what’s already in your brain about the job to predict topics.
2. Analyze the job description
The second way to find clues about the questions you might get asked is to go one step further and look past the job title to job description itself. Generally, job descriptions have four parts:
The Overview
This section will tell you the basic role you’ll be doing. For example, here is the overview from a job description for an IT Sales Lead Development Representative:
“You’ll be an important member of the sales organization, qualifying leads, profiling customers, and providing input on which sales campaigns generate the best leads. The objective is to identify and create qualified opportunities for the Education vertical, working in collaboration with your global peers, marketing, account managers and the partner channel.”
So this overview is giving you clues about potential questions. Every point in it could be a question. For instance, they could ask you about “When have you provided input on sales campaigns” or “What is your experience qualifying leads?”
The Role and Responsibilities
You should read this part of the description very carefully. This section is where the everyday duties of the job are described. This is where you’ll find your biggest clues about what kinds of things the interviewer will be asking.
For instance, this section might say that “You will run teams in an Agile or Scrum environment.” If this is the case, then one of the behavioral questions you might get asked is “Tell me about a time you were in charge of a team that was working in Agile.”
If this section lists “Update and maintain customer information within SalesForce” you may get a behavioral question about when you did this.
The Qualifications
If the role is IT Manager, one of the qualifications may be a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. If you do have this degree, be prepared to discuss it. If you don’t have the degree, prepare a reason that you can do the job without it.
The wish list or desired attributes
Most job descriptions include a wish list of skills that aren’t necessarily required but are useful. If you do have any of these, be sure to add them to your stories so it’s clear that you bring something extra.
3. Use more than one job description
Sometimes the job description is very short and you can tell the company didn’t spend much time writing it. In that case I usually search for several job descriptions – not necessarily from the same company – and then combine the info from them into one long list of requirements/skills.
Doing this will at least give you more to go on than a short badly written job description.
If you combine what you know about the job title with what you can see from one or more job descriptions, you should have a good list of questions to prepare for.
I advise you to go through the job description and turn each bullet (and even the sentences that are written in paragraph format, usually at the beginning of the job description) into a question and then write a story for them.
4. Use the industry
What industry are you in? This will also give you an idea of what questions you’ll be asked. If you’re a product designer, for example, it’s reasonable to expect you may get asked your opinions about current trends in product design such as design systems, design research, UX vs UI, or about your favorite tools.
5. Your resume
Is there anything on your resume that is difficult to explain? Are you not working now? Is there a gap between jobs? Are you switching fields? You can be sure they’ll ask about those points so prepare good answers for them.
If you follow these five steps you should end up with a thorough list of potential interview questions.
Related reading:
Follow up questions you may get asked after your answer