Ana Tavares is a psychologist and recruiter with 12 years of experience finding great employees for tech companies. She shared some of the most common job interview questions HR asks candidates in a fantastic talk at VanHackCON 2021. Most of the time, there are no formulas and no one size fits all approach, but Tavares has excellent advice on how to think about the most critical issues recruiters usually raise in conversations with candidates. Here are 10 of them:
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Tell me more about yourself
“Don’t reply by saying: ‘what do you want to know?’. That is not very creative, and you will force the recruiter to repeat the question. Instead, try to give them the information you would like to receive if you choose. This question has, basically, no right or wrong answer. It is about your personality, what it is your friends, family relatives always say about you, some facts like what is your bucket list.”
Learn more about answering the request to talk about yourself here.
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Why do you want to leave your current job?
“This question is important and not because we are trying to understand if you guys have a problem with your managers. But imagine that you are losing your job because the company is getting too big, and you identify yourself the most with startups. If my company already has 1000 people I would probably like to tell you that I don’t know if this company is the best thing for you since you are leaving a company that is getting too big. A good recruiter and an honest one will also help you to manage your expectations, and they will tell you, ‘I don’t think this is good for you.'”
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What would make you stay?
“It’s important to understand what makes you stay and what makes you give up. What do you value the most, cooperation between the team, or is it the salary? And again, there are no right or wrong answers here. What is important is alignment between the candidate values and what I have to offer. And if what I have to offer is exactly what this individual values, then we have perfect knowledge of it.”
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What is your dream job?
“What is your dream job? Having the right level of certainty on these things is very important for both sides to make decisions, the company and the candidate. If I’m interviewing a recruiter for my tech team and they tell me that they hate sourcing, [I could be able to say] “Guess what? This not a good place for you because we source like crazy’.”
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Why we should not hire you
“Sometimes, we could just go a little bit bolder with the questions, and you can expect some more creative ones. Why? Because they are more difficult to prepare for. So, when they ask you, ‘why should we not hire you?’ it’s okay to say that you have an awful mood in the morning before having coffee or that when you are very stressed, you stay very quiet in a corner.”
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Describe your biggest failure & Describe your biggest success
“Both are important because it helps us how you measure your success and what made you fail. And most importantly, what have you learned from that failure. When I’m interviewing, especially senior candidates, and they say they never failed, I think either the question was not very clear to the candidates, and they identify failure as something super impactful and are not considering smaller things as failures. You can and should definitely explain a bad decision, for example, and tell me how you solved that specific project with a short timeline and how you managed to overcome it. All this is very valid.”
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How do your friends/relatives describe you?
“What do your friends or relatives say about you? Sometimes we ask this question when we have more difficult candidates to open up about themselves. Remember, we are not just hiring a resume. I’m not hiring just python developers; I’m hiring people. I want to know how that person is; I want to know what this person likes. What is important for them? How do they have fun? How do they learn? How do they keep themselves updated about coding skills? And so on.”
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Why would your current manager not let you go?
“This is very good. When candidates have the response right away, usually it’s because they have been speaking about that with their employers, and then they know that they are about to leave. Why do you think you are important for your current workplace? What is the impact that you are bringing? What is the thing that is making them value you so much?. Is it the way you interact with your colleagues? What is it?”
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Describe your current manager
“It’s not about describing them physically obviously, but maybe talking about how they are as a person, how do you connect, how do they give feedback to employees, and how do you communicate with one another. This can be a lot of information because the way you guys are describing the manager is probably the way you see a good or a bad manager, and it’s vital to us to understand.”
Bonus question:
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What would you quit a job after in a month?
“Be honest, is it for the onboarding experience? Is it a bad follow-up? Is it not having the conditions that were promised to you? Or is it being faced with things not discussed in the interview? You need to know what your deal-breakers are because then you will know how to reply to this question in a very intuitive and honest way.”
Watch Ana Tavare’s talk at VanHackCON here.
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