Hiring managers and resources often have a few questions to become more confident and comfortable during the interview. The interviewers have heard the most common answers and expect similar or slightly different responses.
While using canned answers is not encouraged, it can prove useful for moving ahead of the common questions during an interview. Moreover, companies are searching for the best candidates and would most likely prefer candidates prepared in advance.
5 Common Interview Questions and Answers
● Tell Me/Us About Yourself
Indian government exams like IAS often conduct panel discussions, whereas corporate interviews happen one-to-one. The most likely question asked by a panel or an interviewer is to explain briefly about you.
Interviewers would often ask about family details, education, and experience to summarize your brief. However, you should bear in mind that the interview time is limited and prepare a short answer for these three aspects in advance.
● Why Do You Want to Work for Us?
After clearing the first phase, the company recruiters and managers desire to know why an interviewee would want to work for them. At this point, they expect answers based on online reputation, word of mouth, and research.
The best answer should include opportunities for career growth, personal contributions, and encouragement from the company’s scaling up. You can even choose between these options to make the answer crisp.
● Why Should the Company Hire You?
Interviewers might not have read your resume and delegated the interviews to the HR trainees. So, they often ask why a company should hire a candidate (you – in this case). They even expect answers crafted around previous experience/company, team and culture, and exceptional skills.
Therefore, the best answer is to explain awards received in previous organizations and something that you can offer better than others, or exceptionally. You can even craft an answer around the skills that match the company’s requirements.
● What are Your Strengths?
Once the interviewer becomes comfortable with your profile and experience, they would like to know specific strengths for the job role. For example, nowadays, spoken English, soft skills, or advanced English course certification add more value to the resume and the interview.
Anyways, you can answer the question by using a specific job-oriented strength, share growth stories, or mention something that makes you memorable. While answering, avoid generalization as it categorizes you and doesn’t appeal to the recruiters/managers.
● What are Your Weaknesses?
The question is tricky for the first-time interviewee as the recruiter wants to identify pressing matters. Moreover, most people might even get rejected or excused for not answering the question properly.
While answering the question, you can provide an example of a previous company or situation with solutions or positive opinions. You can also answer about something related to growth aspects that is still on hold or impress by stating that you are a workaholic. Besides this, the interviewers may ask about work histories and reasons for leaving the previous organizations.
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