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If you’re preparing for a job interview, you’re likely expecting the most common questions asked by hiring committees. According to a 2021 Zety survey of professionals involved in hiring, “Tell me about yourself” and “Tell me about a challenge or conflict you faced at work and how did you deal with it?” are the two most common questions. “What are your greatest strengths/weaknesses?” both made the top five.
But rather than spending most of your time preparing for these common questions, you should focus on more critical questions that will be asked in a job interview. The source for these questions can be found in one place: the job posting.
“We used to have stock questions that we would ask,” said Linda Zane, a professor of elementary education and early childhood at Slippery Rock University, who has chaired seven faculty searches during the last 12 years. “But we’ve become more critical, asking questions that have been more tailored to exactly what we’re looking for.”
The questions that really matter to search committees are not of the getting-to-know-you variety but those directly tied to the preferences listed on the job posting.
“When we write the job posting, we ask ourselves, ‘OK, what do we need and what do we want to see in a candidate?'” Zane said. “So, if you are a job seeker, you should really look at the job posting and try to pull out keywords as to what [the employer is] looking for and then tailor your responses to that. It might seem like common sense, but candidates get so hung up on the process [of explaining who they are] that they don’t really think it through.”
That’s because, understandably, candidates are thinking about themselves. They often feel like they have to explain their motives or career trajectory from their perspective. They’re thinking about what’s in it for them, not the employer.
“I don’t care about you,” Zane said. “I care about the fact that you can fill what we need.”
As an example, Zane recently chaired a search for a faculty position in her department. Listed among the preferred qualifications was teaching experience in “ethnically diverse and/or linguistically diverse contexts” and community engagement experience with “the skills necessary to establish collaborative relationships with community or school-based practitioners in BIPOC early childhood settings.”
Sure enough, among the six questions asked during the first round of interviews were the following two questions: 1.) “How have you built and sustained relationships in the community and with schools?” and 2.) “Given your experience working in settings with exceptional diversity and or high-needs areas, can you tell us more about your commitment to education as a social justice and equity issue in our country?”
This is not to say the committee entirely avoided common questions and queues, such as “Tell me about yourself.” The purpose of these questions is often to break the ice before asking more substantiating questions. While they care more about filing their needs, most search committees aren’t out to make candidates uncomfortable right off the bat. These are called “gimme questions” and candidates should still be prepared for them.
Even if search committees resist asking trite questions such as “What are your strengths/weaknesses?” they are still asked just from the perspective of the employers’ needs.
Here’s one of the questions asked by Zane’s committee: “Given what you have previewed about our program on our website, where do you feel as though you can make a novel contribution to our department?” Asked another way, this question could be: “What are your strengths that would help us?” A good response would be to select keywords from the job posting’s preferred qualifications and provide evidence from your career to support it. Beyond the obvious community engagement and diversity examples listed above, the job posting mentioned things like course design and “educational technology in the teaching-learning process.”
Finally, it’s important for candidates to expect behavioral questions, such as the “Tell me about a challenge…” prompt that made the top five in Zety’s survey. In addition to past behavior being a predictor of future performance, this question is commonly asked because it gets away from discussing accomplishments listed on resume/CV, which the interviewer is already aware of.
Before an interview, prepare a bank of anecdotes that you can draw from to respond to behavioral questions. Respond with a succinct story that explains the setting, conflict, rising action, climax, and resolution. Even if you didn’t solve the problem in your anecdote, your response should exhibit what you learned and how you would handle a situation in the future.
Again, just make sure you tailor your responses to the employer’s problems. Don’t just use any anecdote to show off what a great problem-solver you are. Make it relevant.
In conclusion, the job posting might seem like an obvious source for knowing what the search committee is looking for, but it can still be easy for candidates to become preoccupied with the common interview questions and focus on themselves. Remember, the interview is not about you; it’s about the employer and their needs.
