Get prepared for your next interview with the interview question of the week.
It's that time again! It's time for the Interview Question of the Week. Whether you are looking for a job or thinking about making a move, one of the keys to standing out during your interview is practice. It's not enough to show up and do your best to get through it anymore. By preparing ahead of time for the types of questions that will be asked and sketching out your answers, you won't have to worry about forgetting the main things you wanted to say or worse, drawing a blank.
To help you get prepared, each week we go over another popular interview question and break it down to figure out the best way to answer it. So, here you go, the Interview Question of the Week:
Question:
What do you think about (any controversial subject)
Why it's a trap:
A professional interviewer should know better than to ask any of these opinion questions. The most frequent time you will run into this sort of question is at a more casual lunch or dinner interview. When you and the interviewer are making small talk, and there is good rapport, the interviewer may ask you opinion about a current event or something that is on their mind that they read about in the paper today. The trap here is that if you state an opinion that is opposite theirs, they may become upset or want to debate the facts with you. Once that happens, there is really no way to win.
The best answer:
Whenever you feel stuck and don't want to answer a question, the best tactic is to answer the question with another question. The beauty of this technique is that it puts the conversation back on the other person and keeps the discussion from growing and getting into areas that make you uncomfortable.
For example:
“What do you think about (politician's name)?” You can say “why do you ask?” or “Why, are they in the news again?”.
The beauty of this is that, if you do it right, the interviewer will assume that you agree with them, even though you haven't actually stated an opinion.
Another option is to give an opinion that almost anyone can agree with. In the above example, you could say “Honestly, I find it hard to like any politician.”. The only problem with this tactic is that if you employ it too often you run the risk of appearing to be wishy-washy or someone who doesn't really have an opinion on anything.
I feel like I need to say here that if your interviewer is your potential new boss, and they ask you many questions that are out of line like this one, you may want to seriously consider if you want to work for them.
What do you think about this question and answer? Are there other questions you would like to see answered here? Let me know in the comments.
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By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer for FinancialJobBank. Along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.
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