The Only Three True Interview Questions

From Forbes Magazine contributor George Bradt writes this piece about Acing the only three true interview questions. His questions are:

• Can you do the job?
• Will you love the job?
• Can we tolerate working with you?

and he has a more detailed piece about why these are the only three questions.  First I encourage everyone to read both of his pieces, but his advice for acing these interview questions he gives three simple steps:

1. Think before opening your mouth.
2. Answer the question asked.
3. Bridge to answer the true underlying question.

I have unfortunately not been  meticulously documenting all interview questions I have gotten in the past two and a half years of my job search. I can however give some examples of how I think I have done this well and how I have not done so well.

First the not so well...

I was interviewing for a job as an academic librarian where the primary job function was managing the information commons (which was being built in the new building.) My understanding of one of the primary job functions was that this position would be responsible for programming, that is organizing and putting on events to bring students, faculty, and the public to the library. I can freely admit that this was not my biggest strength, but I have experience putting on these types of events. So at several points in the interview (and for those of you who are unfamiliar with academic interviews, they average a day and a half!) when I was asked about programming background and/or ideas I described my experiences. Now my personal experiences primarily center around using games (board, computer, console, and trivia) and while I am sure I mentioned other ideas I can with hindsight see that if most of my ideas appeared to be centered on games and gaming this might not jive with the library and staff.

By using Mr. Bradt's three steps here is something closer to how I might have answered the question:

think about my gaming experience
Begin the answer with a brief example of one of these game events, but quickly pivot to how I have planned events, and programs around many themes depending on circumstances.

Where I think I did well...

In this case I was interviewing for an academic librarian where the primary job function was business reference. The question was about my experience developing a collection for students and faculty in this area. I answered by describing which business areas I had supported in a previous position, talked about how I worked with the faculty in these areas to learn what was important to them and their students, and then described a project at that previous job where we analyzed the collection and removed a large amount of material that was dated, and no longer as important for students and researchers.

Now I did not get that job either, but I did have a very positive conversation with the administrator in charge of the search about how well I did, and my strengths as a candidate (which is unfortunately rare) but how the candidate they chose had twenty years experience and an advanced degree in business.

I for one am going to be practicing the techniques that Mr. Bradt describes. Have you had any experiences positive or negative with job interviews and these types of questions? How do you answer them?

Not finding a job... 4 possible reasons

Over on AOL Jobs is an article giving four reasons why you are still unemployed. My first thoughts upon reading this was that these reasons were overly general and unhelpful. I hope that anyone who has been or still is in the long term unemployed (anything over six months) they have read many articles like this one. There list (if you don't have time to read the short piece) is as follows:

• do a little soul searching
• identify what your target employer wants
• ramp up your networking
• demonstrate your expertise

Are there any of these you aren't doing? If you answered yes, then maybe you want to start with the soul searching. But I feel that it would be fairly safe to assume that most of you have done these and many things like them. While I don't claim to be an expert on numbers 1, 3, &4 I hope I am qualified to speak on number 2. If you haven't read my past posts on researching companies you may want to start there (research tips, you may want to focus on the oldest three posts which are specifically on company research.)

But how do you do this research if you don't already have a list of target companies in mind. One of the best ways I know of would be to use RefUSA or some similar database that lets you filter by type of company, geography, and other characteristics. These are typically subscription tools, so you first step will be to visit your local public library (or it's web site) to find out if they provide access to such a tool (you may be surprised!) Here is a graphic showing just some databases useful for this research and what you may find:

From the Purdue University Career Wiki

There are many others, and if your library doesn't have access to these, start a conversation... explain what you are trying to learn and you may find that the librarian can be very helpful, they may have others that can help you in the same area.

If they do have access, then hopefully a reference librarian there can help demonstrate how to search effectively... but things to look for are the following:

• setting your geographic preferences (typically by zip code)
• setting your industry (or type of company you are looking for...) this can either be done with government codes or with common yellow page style headings

these are more or less essential, but some additional options you might want to use:

• company size (either number of employees or by sales volume)

once you have a reasonable list, you can begin with web searches... but you may want to consider reading about the companies in the business press, here are my thoughts about those types of searches.

Hopefully this advice is just a bit more practical  than the AOLJobs article, and I wish all job seekers out there good luck as the global economy slowly begins to turn around.

-George