The one interview question you need to nail
I’ll give away a secret: you’re the one asking it.
Job interviews are a two way street. I’m sure you’ve read this before followed by some unhelpfully vague description of the importance of being a good fit for the company. Though that certainly is a part of the interview process, there is something much more important you need to find out in an interview: Do the company, the position and the team offer an opportunity to maximize your potential?
That is the question you should nail, and here’s my step by step for finding the answer.
step 1: turn the recruitment process around
You can try to infer if the company is a potential maximizing place from reading through a company’s PR materials (i.e. their website), but that is a mistake. For starters, every company pays lip service to the idea that they should foster employee development. Reading PR materials might tell you what they preach, but not how well they practice. More importantly though, PR materials don’t tell you anything about the people you’ll be actually working with. Those people will play a huge role in your life for the next couple of years. So to prime your thinking, see job interviews as a chance for you to recruit people for the role of mentor, teacher, or motivator in the enterprise that is you.
step 2: formulate your questions
Think of yourself as a detective, trying to solve a case. What information are you missing to determine whether this company is guilty of being an awesome or awful place to work?
The more concrete your questions are, the better they will let you assess if this company and team have what it takes. It’s funny that many of these questions truly are interview questions (or bullet points on your resume) turned around.
Examples of questions for team members: What makes you get up in the morning? Tell me about your work experience? What was your favorite project at this company? What is your work/management philosophy? What time do you get to work? How do you approach X (with X being your profession)? How do you like to interact with team members?
Examples of questions about the company: Do employees get an individual education budget? How do you support employee development? How do you get stuff done throughout the company? How does management set and communicate goals? Why did the company decide to go in a certain strategic direction?
step 3: write down the answers in a structured way and discuss them with friends
I always make a spreadsheet of all the companies I’ve applied to, how I applied to them, whom I spoke to in each round and what my impressions were. This structure allows me to see the patterns across multiple rounds of interviews. But you can’t make the decision the moment after you’ve filled in the last cell of your spreadsheet. Give it a day to sink in, a night of sleep and discuss it with friends and family. It is easy to ignore red flags when you’re looking at a spreadsheet with exonerating evidence. It’s harder to do this when you discuss all your impressions with a sister, friend, or partner whose professional opinion you value. You can always ask for a day, or a week, to think your options over. A company that tries to pressure you into deciding right now is such a big red flag that you don’t even need to be sorry if they don’t want to wait.
Don’t be afraid to interview companies. In the end you share a common goal: to maximize your professional potential.
