The most important interview question to nail

How to turn an interview into a collaborative conversation.

We all know the common behavioural interview questions, right?

• Tell me your greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses
• Tell me about a time you worked in a team
• Describe a stressful work situation and how you handled it
• Let me hear about a time you failed
• The list goes on…

It might surprise you to learn that none of those questions is the most important one to nail in an interview. In my experience interviewing graduate candidates for a very successful high-growth company in New York, candidates really need to nail the question: “why do you want this job?” The reason is because no matter how great you are at working in a team or dealing with high-pressure situations, no one will want to hire you if they’re convinced you’re not going to love it and will likely leave in six months.

This goes beyond company culture and making sure the hiring manager isn’t bringing in someone toxic who will ruin the vibe (though it’s obviously important to avoid that, too). This is about dollars and cents. Hiring is one of the greatest expenses that companies make.

Not only do companies spend loads of money on job boards, recruitment agencies, branding initiatives, etc. to get new hires in the door, but they also have the oft-hidden costs that come with onboarding and training. If you’ve just joined a company, notice that they’re paying you your fully salary despite that fact that you don’t know the job yet. That means that they’re not getting the ROI (return on investment) on you until you actually know what you’re doing and can start making money for the company. Not to mention, the people training you are spending time teaching you how to do the job, rather than doing their own job of making money for the company.

So… yeah, companies want to make sure you’re not going to hate it and leave after six months because that will waste all of their time, effort and, yes, money spent on training you.

Here’s the problem, though. Few interviewers in my experience are bold enough to directly ask the question “why do you want this job?” Instead, they try to tease it out of you in a round-about way and gauge things like your energy levels or how passionately you spoke about a previous role that has ties to this one. It’s all a big game where they’re trying to figure it out on the fly while keeping an engaging conversation going. And if you can’t convince them of why you really want the job… well, you’re probably not going to get it. So how do we get around this?

We get around it by owning the conversation up front. Contrary to what I hinted at earlier earlier, however, the most important interview question to nail is actually “tell me about yourself.” Why? Because when done correctly, this allows you to explain to them right away why you want the job and how it fits into your broader career path without waiting for the interviewer to ask. You’re telling them why you’re both having the conversation by explaining how you got here and, importantly, why this job makes sense to help you get to your ultimate goal later down the track.

This does a couple of things:

• It relieves the interviewer of the burden of identifying if your experience and ambitions make sense, at a high level, for this job. You’ve already explained it and, in the process, shown you understand the core elements of the job for which you’re interviewing. Now the interviewer can focus on assessing if you’ll be good at the job, and you can narrow your focus to answering those questions.
• It opens up the interview into more of a discussion. I’ve found that when you take this approach, it provides more balance to the conversation. Though it doesn’t always feel like it, interviews are a two-way street. The company has to make sure you’re the right fit for them, and you need to make sure they’re the right fit for you. When you’ve anchored the discussion around your career interests, it becomes less of the classic, boring interview where they ask questions and you answer, and becomes more of an open conversation to make sure there’s a fit for both sides.
• Side note — sometimes when you do this, you find that the interviewer starts to sell you on why it’s the right fit for your career journey. This is only ever a good thing and gives you more power in the conversation.

Every interview I’ve had since employing this tactic has gone very well. As long as you can tell a compelling story for why you want the job and how it fits into your experience thus far and broader career goals, you’ll have a big leg up on everyone else who can’t. Now work on fitting that into your introduction at the start of the interview and you just wait and see how much better that conversation goes.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to chat more or are seeking 1-on-1 coaching or consulting, email me at dcdiscovers@gmail.com.