How to Answer Tough Questions in a Job Interview
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Here's your Money Briefing for Wednesday, April 7th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. Few things in life are more daunting, more intimidating, more white-knuckling than a job interview. There's a lot on the line. And while every job applicant wants to make a good first impression and ultimately land the job, getting from step one to step two can involve navigating some tough and even awkward questions.
It's important to pay a lot of attention to what the interview process can tell you about what it might be like to work somewhere.
We'll check in with our careers reporter, Katherine Dill, about the questions and answers to prepare for. That's after the break.
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There were more than 7 million job openings in the U.S. at the end of February. That means a spring hiring boom, with calendars filling up with job interview appointments and applicants filled with nerves. Successful job seekers have to be ready for a full range of questions, but it's important to know when they're a little too personal or even inappropriate and how to handle the tough ones, like about money. Catherine Dill covers careers for us, and she joins me now to discuss. Catherine, thanks for taking the time to be with us.
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Wow.
How does the episode introduce why interviews feel so intimidating?
Catherine, I'm getting chills just talking about job interviews.
You and lots of other people right now. You know, as the vaccine distribution gains steam across the country and, you know, there's a lot of good news for folks who are on the job hunt right now or who are already employed and are hoping to change jobs, lots and lots of people are going to be thinking about interviewing right now. And it's a, you know, it's an experience that essentially everyone with a job has had and will have many times over their career. But it really never becomes less anxiety producing for people. And so, you know, thinking about some of these topics in advance is really important.
You know, a lot of people probably have been through several job interviews in an office sitting across from somebody behind a desk. But we're in the new world now with interviews over Zoom. And that can kind of make it harder to develop some kind of a connection with the interviewer, you know, just to kind of develop some sense of comfort. So what are experts suggesting job seekers do to kind of break the ice a bit?
One of the things you can do that can be helpful is finding out which you know, you'll probably know, although this remote world has made it a little bit more complicated where your interviewer is going to be, and what's going on there. So this was suggested to me earlier this year that, you know, someone who was interviewing with a company in California, they themselves were somewhere else, you know, it was during the really bad wildfires. And so they sat down immediately with a question about, you know, like, How are things going? How are you and your family feeling? That can range from something more serious like that to the weather on the East Coast, things like that that are really sort of basic and help you shake off those nerves and, like you said, break the ice a little bit.
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