Decoding Interview Questions

Learning how to navigate the reasoning behind interview questions and adjust your answers accordingly is imperative to interview success — that's why the Steinbright Career Development Center has put together the following to help you along the way.

Tell Me About Yourself

Employers are looking for you to summarize your relevant skills, accomplishments, and experience. To identify which skills and accomplishments are relevant, look at the skills and duties outlined in the job description. The skills you discuss should be skills that are mentioned in the job description or that help explain why you would be good at this particular job.

Other Ways This Common Question Might Be Phrased

• Summarize your relevant skills and experience.
• Tell me why you are a good fit for this job.
• I like your résumé, tell me more about your background.
• How would other people describe you?
• What would your last boss say about you?

Why Is This Question Typically Asked?

• Employers ask this question as an ice-breaker, a casual question that you should be prepared for and should put you at ease.
• This question helps begin a conversation about your skills, and can be used to assess your oral communication skills.

Tips for Answering This Question

• Prepare your answer in advance, this is a really common question.
• Emphasize your skills and strengths that fit the job description.
• Give an example of an accomplishment, project, or previous experience that fits the position.
• Be concise and use clear language.
• Practice!!

The "Tell me about Yourself" question is also referred to as a 30 Second Commercial or Elevator Pitch. You can find a helpful worksheet on Interviewing.

What Is Your Greatest Strength?

This question is your chance to shine, show your confidence, and give specific examples of how you can help the employer meet their needs. It may feel uncomfortable, but you have to be able to brag about yourself; no one else at the interview can do that for you. The employer just met you after all. Keep in mind there is a fine line between being confident and being cocky. You must come down on the side of confidence in your entry level skills.

Other Ways This Common Question Might Be Phrased

• What makes you a good fit for the job?
• Why should we hire you?
• What sets you apart from other candidates?
• How can you help us?

Why Is This Question Typically Asked?

• Employers ask this question to assess your confidence and self-awareness.
• Your answer can assure the employer you read the job description and can meet at least some of their immediate needs.

Tips for Answering This Question

Think about your strengths in advance, make a list and have a strong example ready to go for each strength. Think about strengths in three categories:

• Personality: creativity, attention to detail, persistence etc.
• Industry: programming languages, software, equipment, or protocols etc.
• Core: leadership, problem solving, resourcefulness etc.
  • The examples you give should show how you've developed these skills over time. You cannot just claim to be a good worker, you have to show how you get it done.
  • The strengths you highlight should be relevant to the job. You may be a black belt in karate but, unless you are interviewing to work at a karate studio, this would not be relevant. To identify which skills and accomplishments are relevant, look at the skills and duties outlined in the job description. The skills you discuss should be skills that are mentioned in the job description or that help explain why you would be good at this particular job.
• As often as you can, talk about a strength that is listed in the job description as a required skill.
• Choose an example from a work situation, class project, or volunteer opportunity and then from activities.

Many people are uncomfortable talking about themselves. The more you practice, the easier it gets. If you are unsure about your strengths, try these strategies:

• Ask a trusted friend, co-worker, or fellow member of a student organization what they think your strengths are.
• Review evaluations from current or former managers if you have had work experiences, what skills were you praised for?
• Reach out to trusted faculty (or TA's) and ask them for feedback.
• Think about compliments you have received from customers, co-workers, or teammates on class projects. Are there themes that occur in their answers?

Whatever answer you give, you have to own your answer. End your statement with a period or an exclamation mark in your speech, not a question mark.

Do say: I'm good at leading others and with communication skills. At an internship two summers ago, I trained about 15 other interns and developed a training manual and quizzes for the manager to use. They still use my training tools today!

Don't say: I think I'm good at training? (it sounds like you are not sure). Instead, present your case with proof of your experience — with confidence.

What Is Your Biggest Weakness?

This question can show up in many forms and is not meant to "trick" you or make you look bad.

Other Ways This Common Question Might Be Phrased

• What is a skill you are looking to develop in this position?
• What is a skill you are still working on?
• What was your greatest challenge at your last job?
• If I talked to your previous supervisor, what would they say you needed to improve upon?

Why Is This Question Typically Asked?

• Employers ask this question to see how self-aware you are.
• Your response to this question can help determine your learning style and openness to growth and improvement.
• As you answer this question, employers are looking to see whether you have taken steps to improve upon this area for growth.

Tips for Answering This Question

• Don't give a cliché answer to this question, such as "I'm a perfectionist" or "I care too much about my work" – these responses are heard often and don't display good self-awareness.
• Don't give an answer to this question that indicates you can't perform a core function of the job. For example, if you are applying for a computer programming position, you don't want to say your greatest weakness is coding, or if you are applying to a job at a call center, you don't want to say you can't talk on the phone.
• Don't answer this question in a way that raises red flags, such as saying you have a hard time being on time to work.
• Do use this as an opportunity to talk about how you've taken feedback and how you've proactively taken steps to improve. For example, if you're a less detail-oriented person, you could say, "I tend to see the big picture of projects I'm working on and can sometimes lose track of the details. To combat this, I write down a list of all the steps I need to take to complete a project so nothing gets missed."
• Do prepare an answer that still demonstrates your skills for the job. For example, if you are applying to a position that requires you to spend a lot of time interacting with others, you could say, "I work best with others and can struggle when I have to do a lot of work by myself on a computer all day. That's part of what drew me to this position, since the job requires most of my time to be spend interacting with others."
• Do prepare a response that utilizes the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result). This question, along with most other interview questions, is best answered with a specific example from your past experience.

Tell Me About a Time You Overcame a Challenge

This is a very broad question – a challenge could be anything (a tight deadline, a team member who is not doing their fair share of the work, broken equipment, etc.).

Other Ways This Common Question Might Be Phrased

• Tell me about a time you ran into an obstacle.
• Tell me about a time a project did not go the way you planned.
• Tell me about a time you experienced conflict and how you handled it.
• Tell me about a time you faced opposition when proposing a plan of action. How did you handle the situation?

Why Is This Question Typically Asked?

• Employers want to know that you can keep your cool under pressure.
• The response to this question will show resilience.
• The response to this question can demonstrate other soft skills, such as problem solving, teamwork, and critical thinking.
• Challenge and conflict have negative connotations – employers want to see if a candidate can take a negative situation and change it to a positive experience.

Tips for Answering This Question

This is a behavioral question, meaning the employer is looking for you to tell a story about your past experience, so use the STAR method!

Situation: Describe the job/project that you were involved in to provide context.

When I was working with my team on my first-year design project, we were creating an app that could track where different food trucks were located on campus on any given day.

Task: Specifically, state what your task was and the challenge.

I was in charge of delegating and reporting on our progress, and my teammate was overseeing the programming in Python, since I am not very familiar with this language. My teammate came down with mono and was out sick for many weeks, which made it difficult to complete the project by the deadline.

Action: Provide details on the steps you took to address the challenge. Be specific about your role and contributions to the team.

First, we notified our professor, so that if we expected needing more time, she knew our situation in advance. Then, I worked with my team and our TA to learn more about Python, so that our team could work on the programming while our teammate was out sick. Since I was originally in charge of delegating tasks, I re-organized our roles and project timeline so that we could meet the deadline. This meant scaling back on the extra features we wanted to incorporate into the app.

Result: Wrap up your answer by explaining the results.

Ultimately, we completed the project by the deadline. By removing the extra features, it allowed us to master the programming we needed to learn for the overall app to work as planned. The app was successful, and I learned a lot more about Python than I had expected.

Tell Me About a Time You Worked as Part of a Team

Other Ways This Common Question Might Be Phrased

• Did you ever have to work in a committee?
• Have you ever been a part of a project?
• Were you ever assigned to a leadership role?
• Did you ever have to manage part of a task?
• How do you feel about group work?
• What if you had to pick up the slack for someone as part of a team?
• Are you used to working with people that may have different ways of completing a task than you do?
• Are you a member of any teams or organizations?
• Do you consider yourself a team player?
• Do you work best alone or in a group?

Why Is This Question Typically Asked?

• Questions like this are usually used to better understand how you might fit into a group dynamic. Are you comfortable being in charge? Can you handle difficult conversations (making sure others are on task in a group)? How do you bet communicate with others? Are you an organizer? What kind of support do you usually need to do your best work?
• The employer may need to be sure you will fit into a work team that works very closely, has a challenging individual member, or that you can handle days when you might be on your own and be sure you can get your work completed. Communication is important in any team situation, and they need to know you are comfortable asking for help as well as offering your own suggestions when appropriate.

Tips for Answering This Question

• You can offer several different examples and then provide more detail for one you are most proud of or think is the most relevant. To identify which skills and accomplishments are relevant, look at the skills and duties outlined in the job description. The example you discuss should align with skills that are mentioned in the job description or that help explain why you would be good at this particular job.
• For example, you could say "I have worked in many different types of teams including group work for classes, I volunteer with X organization, I have a big family and I have to help out a lot there, I have/had a job where I work with several people, but one example I am most proud of is a class competition where I was in charge of organizing everyone's tasks and making sure they were on schedule. I was basically the project manager, and we ended up getting a great grade and I learned a lot about managing different personalities."
• If using this more specific example, be sure to offer a little detail about what the project goals were and what class it was for.
• For any interview question, remember that you are a blank slate to the interviewer, and you should assume they have no understanding of Drexel classes, curriculum, etc., and don't know anything about your background and interests.