We've all been there. And only afterward did we realize that we were responding to some unspoken interview questions, and doing a rather poor job of it.
At Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Business, alumni are called upon to form boards to help current students prepare for their entrance in to the job market and excel in their chosen fields. I recently had the opportunity to hear from alumni in our Marketing Board, including Scott Overson of Intel, Scott Pulsipher of Needle, David Hunt of Illusive Networks, Jordan Archibald of Qualtrics, and Whitney Seamons (formerly of Microsoft and J&J). They were invaluable in helping demystify those hidden job interview questions and taught how to approach them with grace and confidence.
In no particular order, here are the hidden questions you need to nail to put you ahead of other candidates:
How do you analyze a problem?
There are two traps when discussing our past experience. One is to simply address the duties that we performed. This is easily the most egregious mistake as well as the most boring for the interviewer to endure.
The second is talking about accomplishments without context. While it may be wonderful that you increased market penetration 17% through a customer acquisition strategy, that doesn't spell out to the listener what actions you took to get there and how those actions make you special.
So do the interviewer a favor: set up the problem for them in a sentence. Why was this problem important? What did it mean for the company? Give your story some drama! Then talk about the one or two things you did to really understand and address the problem. Sure, you may have done a lot more, but they don't want your autobiography. The interviewer wants the highlights. And third, make sure to include those results. Again, the most meaningful, and only the most meaningful.
Are you willing to work past 5:00 PM?
For obvious reasons, no interviewer is going to ask this outright. Just like you're not going to ask about work-life balance (really: don't). But the interviewer will WANT to ask about it. And they'll do everything in their means to tease it out of you without being utterly direct.
Emphasize the incredible level of effort you applied to the impossible feat you accomplished. Be specific about timelines and how you achieved them. For example, "I worked well into the night weeks on end, but seeing our PageRank increase from tens of pages in Google's search engine results to the second page made it all worth it."
Scott Pulsipher's background included working at Amazon, and while he didn't 100% endorse the working conditions (see the New York Times article "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace") , he understood that to do unique, market-changing things required a superhuman level of effort, which Amazon has a knack for consistently applying. He even confided that, on average, since business school he has worked 50 hours per week.
Why are you here?
No, we're not getting philosophical (although if you're interested, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does have a great answer to this called "God's Plan of Salvation"). Interviewers constantly meet folks who have boring reasons for sitting in front of them, like:
- "I want to work here because this area is close to my extended family."
- "I'm here because I saw the job posting on Indeed.com and thought the responsibilities sounded interesting."
- "I'm interested in this job because I heard it pays well, and the hours aren't bad."
- "I want to work here because I've used your products or services and I like them."
These aren't bad reasons, but most people have a slew of these for any given job, and they aren't particularly interesting. Nor do they say anything about you, since 99.9% of the population cares about the same thing.
You should be sitting in front of an interviewer because their company stimulates your intellect on many levels. They do something no one else does, and it resonates with you because you've done something similarly heroic in the past. Or maybe they do something that you believe is incredibly valuable for the economy, for nature, or for the world at large and you find yourself pursuing similar goals.
Whatever your reason, be authentic, and speak to how you and the company "are one". When interviewers talk about "fit", it's not an exercise of the interviewer trying to weigh your attributes and place you in the right spot within a company. It's an exercise of you explaining your spot in the company and them visualizing it without effort.
What questions do you have for me (that really say something about you)?
Alright, so this one does get asked in interviews, but it's so commonly bungled it is worth discussing. Some questions are just no-no's:
- How much does the job pay?
- How much time off do I get?
- What are the benefits like?
These can be answered later after the bigger questions are addressed, or they can be answered more discreetly through a friendly alumnus or alumna who is willing to get real with you in a private conversation.
Other questions are too revealing that you haven't done your homework:
- What's your day to day job look like?
- What group in the company holds the most power when making strategic decisions?
- What products or services make up your offering?
The first two are better suited towards an informational interview with an alumnus or alumna (the second will require a degree of candor that you may not find in the interview and could be a deal breaker before even interviewing), and the third is easily searchable.
So what do good questions look like? Good questions are current, show your insight into the company, and are relevant to the position you want to obtain. If you're pursuing a digital marketing career, a good question for a company like eBay might be "I know as eBay turns 20 this year that mobile is a huge focus. What are your digital marketing teams doing to leverage traditional customer data from the website to improve mobile platform conversion?" Alright, maybe not the best, but you get the idea.
Public relations and investor relations pages are a great place to get company news and should be leveraged for these types of questions. For the question above, I used a story from eBay's investor relations page, titled "Introducing eBay 4.0".
Practice, practice, practice
Now that you know the unspoken questions, the best way to nail them to the ground is practicing answering traditional questions while flavoring your answers with some of the elements we've discussed above. Get your mentor, your good friend, or your significant other to ask you a series of questions and see if they can pick up on some of the subtle hints you are trying to drop.
Now go forth and interview successfully!
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