Prepping for a job interview means knowing how to handle curveball questions about your past jobs, boss and projects. Impressing an interviewer means not just having great career stories to tell, but also thinking two steps ahead to the kind of questions hiring managers like to ask.
So here’s a peek behind the curtain: We talked with recruiters and human resources experts about the go-to interview questions they ask when they want to know how a candidate really thinks. Take notes, job seekers!
3. “Walk me through a project that you’re most proud of.”
Gabrielle Woody, a university recruiter for the financial software company Intuit, said her go-to question is asking people to share their proudest project or accomplishment.
“It’s a really great question. Candidates get really nervous, but if they’re talking about something they truly love, they’re more comfortable. They’ve already done the project. It’s not a hypothetical,” Woody said. “It just allows us to evaluate a lot of their impact ... and it addresses a lot of the key skills and competencies.“
Woody said this question can lead to follow-ups such as how they accomplished the project under constraints, what metrics they used, and how they measured success or failure.
Woody recommends preparing a story around two to three projects you are proud of that are related to the role you are applying for.
She said a great answer happens “if it’s clear to me that they are passionate about what they do and the project involves skills they would be using in their future role,” while a bad answer is “just very vague, or you can tell they’re just sharing what their team did and they might not have had many contributions to it.”
Here’s how to craft an answer to these type of questions:
If you are stumped on how to answer an interview question that asks for a story, Woody recommended the STAR method. She said this checklist helps you stay on track and be very clear about the situation at hand and what your individual deliverables were.
With STAR, you tell an interview story with these four parts:
1. Situation:
Which job was this? When was this? You set the scene and describe the
context within which you performed a job or faced a project at work.
2. Task: You remember to highlight which specific responsibilities you had in the situation.
3. Action: Share what actions you took and showcase how your contribution made an impact.
4. Results: You share why your actions mattered to the team or business. This can be said with data or by detailing steps you took to improve.
“I literally have STAR written down as candidates are answering interviewing questions, and that helps me probe more if they’re missing one of these areas,” Woody said.
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