Turn Your Boring Interview Into Two-Way Insight

Whilst on vacation and strolling through a small art gallery last week, I observed a young twenty-something zip through the entrance and the store owner standing by the door kindly asking the young lady to be seated for an interview. I was curious as to the questions that the store owner would ask and even more interested in how the young lady would answer to set her self apart as she set out to land herself a new job.

What transpired was one of the most bland and boring interviews I’d ever witnessed. It’s not an unusual thing to happen, though, for interviews to be mundane. The trouble is that there are thousands of small business owners or entrepreneurs who were never taught how to formally conduct a rewarding interview. Once that is mixed with interviewees who are new to the work force or have only ever been interviewed with lackluster questions, it creates a recipe for hiring disaster on both ends.

Why is it bad for the company? The last thing that the business wants is an employee that doesn’t perform how they wanted their ideal employee to perform. It’s a wasted hire and the cost to re-train another employee and continue the fire-hire cycle is costly.

On the side of the interviewee-turned-employee, how awful it would be to get into a job that didn’t match your ideals and that you got little or no training for. It’s hard to understand what values the company really has and what the culture is really like when the interview is one-sided or when you don’t know the best questions to ask are.

Although many hiring managers could benefit from learning more about the best approaches to interviews and questions, I want to focus more on interviewees who always seem to get left behind — those who are tired of the interviews that get them nowhere, that dread the 4th interview during that week because they aren’t getting calls back, those who aren’t confident in their delivery of their answers and those who don’t know how to be absolutely sure that the job and the company is really the best fit for them.

My goal here is to help you develop confidence via your own stories and your own achievements and to use both your strengths and desires to really determine whether or not the job you’re interviewing for is really the best for you.

What Kind of Company Do You Really Want to Work For?

There are many of us who have worked in positions we didn’t purely enjoy. It may have been due to a misunderstanding of the opportunities you had to learn and grown in the company or due to a wrong fit within the company’s culture that led to you feeling uncomfortable or not quite fitting in with the group.

Whatever the case, you may already know what you like and what you don’t like in a position, in a manager and within a culture of a company.

If you are new to the work force, you still know what your hopes and dreams are and you know what your motivations are. You can use those to help determine what kind of answers you provide to common interview questions that will enable you to entice the interviewer to uncover whether or not the job is the right fit for you. And fit is so freakin’ important! I really can’t stress that enough. Although you may think you really want a certain job and think that faking it ’til you make it is a good thing, that will quickly come to a halt when you hate your job and realize that you’ve wasted your talents in the wrong place for a couple of years. It wastes your time and the company’s money and it’s a much better feeling to be valued and do valuable work where you’re employed.

To get started, make a short list of the top things that you really enjoy doing in a job or in a project — a few examples:

• Training others
• Learning Something New
• Managing Projects
• Organizing Company Events
• Data Entry
• Analyze Data

Now that you have your list of your ideal roles in a job, let’s twist a couple of common boring interview questions into meaningful conversations that help the interviewer provide more information about what your next possible role may hold for you while also letting your unique personality and talents shine.

Turning Common Boring Questions On Their Head

Most of us know and have answered the typical set of interview questions — where do you see yourself in 5 years, what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, etc. The truth is, common answers are straightforward and allow interviewees to create an ideal version of themselves that they would like the interviewer to hear. Fake it ’til you make it, unverifiable types of stories. “Being an over-achiever is my greatest weakness” and those of the sort. Although they sound exciting, it’s hard to convey passion in a story that is close to reality yet not quite matching your true abilities. It’s also hard to get the interviewer to believe that what you’re saying is a true representation of the real you and not just some answer you Googled.

Using your list, let’s take one of these boring questions and turn it into something valuable for both the interviewer and you.

What are your strengths?

Let’s say one item on your list is training others. You love to train and it’d make you happy if training is a part of the job you’re interviewing for. But it’s easy to for an interviewer to get bored in an interview when everything you’ve done goes right and your stories are full of rainbows and sunshine. Yet, we all know that not everything truly works perfectly to plan — sometimes things go wrong or deadlines get shortened and all of a sudden your whole world flips upside down and you have to stay up all night or work with someone difficult so that you’re successful and the company is successful. That’s the story you want to tell in your interview. Not that you can do something, but what you did when crap hit the fan.

Why? It gives your prospective employer the chance to see how you handle difficult situations, how helpful you are, how well you work with others, how motivated you are, your professionalism and a slew of other behavioral examples that will demonstrate your true potential and personality. Instead of telling them simply that you’re a good team player, you’re telling them the entire story of when something threw a wrench in the plan and how you took control of the situation or how you participated in helping the leader of the team go above and beyond to make their boss happy. Whatever the case and whatever your story is, it reveals the true you and creates a compelling story that will draw the interviewer in to learning more about you.

Using a few of the top most commonly asked interview questions, write a short story that recounts a situation in which you used or actively participated in one or two of the items that you wrote on your list — here’s an example using training others:

Q: What are your strengths?

A: My strengths are best illustrated by a few experiences that I’ve had throughout my career. By the time this story took place, I had already been training how to coach employees for about 3 years, so I was pretty confident that I knew how to get my audience going and how to calm any hecklers. But this time was different. The topic was Difficult Conversations and I hit a topic that seemed to be touchy for one person in my class.

The person made some lewd remarks and it made me uncomfortable, but it was a remark that really wasn’t that unusual for the company culture that I was in. I responded the best way I knew how, in a joking manner yet still conveying that those kinds of remarks aren’t tolerated in the classroom. The remarks continued up to the 10 minute break and I took that opportunity to privately pull the person aside and calmly tell them that their remarks made me uncomfortable and politely asked if they could stop for the duration of the training session. The person apologized and for the rest of the session, it went as smoothly and was as enjoyable as the many others I had taught.

While I answered questions and helped a few attendees one on one at the end of the class, the person who made the remarks sat patiently until I was done helping the remaining attendees. Afterwards, the person thanked me for being frank with them and said that they should shut up more often because they actually learned something! The person said they hated mandatory training that they were sent to but never actually enjoyed one until they sat through my training. We laughed together, he thanked me again and that was that. Everyone’s behaviors are different and I enjoy the challenges that are presented with different personalities when I have the opportunity to train others and work with others.

What kind of opportunities will there be to train diverse groups of people with some of my existing material, like how to have difficult conversations?

Maybe you’re fresh to the work force and would really like a mentor that can show you the ropes that builds on your ability to learn new things quickly. Here’s an example to turn this question around using learning something new:

Q: What are your weaknesses?

A: My knowledge in this area is limited, much like the first time that I took statistics in college. Being new to the subject, I had some hesitation in being successful — but the fantastic thing is that the professor, Dr. Jefferson, took me under her wing when I approached her asking for some extra help during her office hours. I took the opportunity to jot down detailed notes any time I got a little lost during her lectures and she helped provide analogies and metaphors that helped me understand so that I could interpret the content better. It was very encouraging and rewarding.

At the end of the semester, I ended up being one of the students with the highest grades in the class and the confidence that built over the semester enabled me to tutor other struggling students so that they could be successful too.

What kind of opportunities will there be to have a mentor like Dr. Jefferson that may serve as my role model?

Ensuring You Have an Opportunity to Do What You Enjoy

What kind of opportunities will there be to…

The question at the end of each of these answers is key in ensuring that you get your interviewer to expand upon what kind of opportunities you might have to do those things on your list that you enjoy in context of the story that you just told. Outside of asking the typical questions about the company itself, you end up asking about the opportunities as it applies to you.

If you continue to provide more examples of your skills and abilities via these short stories, the interviewer gains insight into you that they may never get out of another interviewee, and that alone will set you apart.

Most importantly, you will have a better understanding of what to expect and whether or not it would be a job that you would truly enjoy. It may even be the case that your interviewer might find you amazing while you discover that they don’t have any opportunities that quite meet what you’re wanting to do at that time in your life.

Even if it’s a job that you have no choice but to get, even if you know you’ll dislike a few things, at least you’ll know what to expect!

Ask For an Example of Poor Performance

Try asking,”Tell me about a time that an employee in this position performed poorly. What happened and what would have made it better?”

The answer to this question can help you understand what the expectations are based on what has happened in the past with other employees. It’s a helpful predictor of what kind of problems you can avoid and how you can immediately come in and do your best. It may also give you some insight about the level of micro-management or self-management involved in the position.

Ask About the Superstar Employees

It’s very possible that the company you are interviewing with has only had superstars and no one has performed poorly. Whether or not that’s the case, ask,”Tell me about a time that an employee in this position went above and beyond. What did they do and what impact did it have?”

Instant goals. It’s hard to fill a superstar’s shoes, so by asking that question you ensure that you understand exactly how your predecessor was able to wow their colleagues so that you can have that Cinderella moment and fill their shoes without a hitch. This gives you a goal or goals to work toward and you can even go above and beyond that to make even bigger shoes to fill if you eventually leave your job.

Syndi Braun is a customer experience advocate, consultant & sales professional who helps others successfully transform their businesses and themselves.