101 Smart Questions to Ask on Your Interview (6 page)

BOOK: 101 Smart Questions to Ask on Your Interview
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Like people

Like to travel

Logical

Love animals

Love children

Loyal

Make friends easily

Moral

Musical

Neat

Obsessive

Organized

Passionate

Passive

Patient

Perfectionist

Performer

Physically strong

Precise

Professional

Quick-thinking

React well to authority

Religious

Responsible

Right-brained

Risk averse

Risk taker

Sales personality

Self-motivated

Sports fan

Strong-willed

Supportive of others

Tenacious

Welcome change

Well-groomed

(Other)____

These are all positive attributes, of one kind or another, to one company or another. After you’ve circled all those you believe best describe you, ask your friends if they agree with your assessment.

You can use this list in a few important ways. First, it will help you better answer two key questions:

How do these positives match up with the qualities you believe are necessary for success in the job/career path you’ve chosen?
Do you have the qualities generally associated with the level of responsibility/job title you are seeking?

Let’s say you are seeking a promotion to vice president at a major corporation, which would mean significant financial responsibility and hundreds of employees under your benevolent control. You will have a problem getting an interview, let alone the job, if you can’t demonstrate managerial, team-building, motivational, and financial skills and
experience (among others). So if you lack all or most of those characteristics, your current goal isn’t realistic, and you must create a plan to attain the skills and experience you need to reach your professional goals.

Another important question is suggested by this list:

How many of these qualities/abilities do you
want
to use in your job?

Alternately, how many of the qualities you’ve deemed most important to your sense of self do you
need
to involve in your job? Only you can figure this out, but I suspect most people would be happy if their jobs utilized
more
of their abilities and interests rather than fewer. The happiest people I’ve ever met are those able to employ the qualities, skills, and talents they deem important at a company at which
those specific attributes
lead to success.

Another way to utilize this list is to identify qualities you lack but deem important to your next job or your future career. This will enable you to create a plan to develop, attain, or obtain what you want and need to succeed in your chosen path and reach your expressed goals.

What Kind of Life Are You Seeking?

How can you know what you want if you haven’t taken the time to assess what’s really important to you? Look at the list of values below (adapted from
Targeting the Job You Want,
one of an excellent series produced by The Five O’Clock Club, a top job-search group). Rate how important each is to you (“1” for least important and “4” for most):

Adventure

Being considered an expert

Challenging tasks

Chance to advance

Chance to create

Chance to grow

Chance to have an impact

Chance to lead

Chance to learn

Chance to participate

Clear expectations

Clear procedures

Competition

Creativity

Enjoyable colleagues

Enjoyable surroundings

Enjoyable tasks

Excitement

Fast pace

Freedom from worry

Glamour

Having responsibility

Helping people

Helping society

Independence

Influencing people

Intellectual stimulation

Leadership

Meeting challenges

Money

Moral fulfillment

Personal growth

Power

Prestige

Public contact

Recognition from peers

Recognition from society

Recognition from superiors

Slow pace

Stability (security)

Structure

Time with family

Working alone

Working for something you believe in

Working on a team

Of those descriptions marked “4,” identify the five
most
important to you right now. Then, of
those
five, admit which you would give up (if any) if you had to. Which would you
never
give up, no matter what?

Based on this exercise, you should be able to compose a brief paragraph describing the values of the company you’d (ideally) want to work for and the job you’d (ideally) love to have.

The Practical Aspects of Your Job Hunt

In addition to assessing the kind of person you are, which will give you a better idea of the kind of people you want to work with and the environment in which you want to work, there are some more mundane questions you need to ask yourself:

Where (geographically) do I want to work?
Do I prefer a large city, small city, town, or somewhere as far away from civilization as possible?
Do I prefer a warm or cold climate?
Do I prefer a large or small company? (Define your terms—by sales, income, employees, etc.)
What kinds of products/services/accounts would I prefer to work with?
Do I mind traveling frequently? What percentage of my time is “reasonable”?
How much time am I willing to devote to a daily commute? At what point will its length impact my other priorities (family, hobbies, etc.)?
What salary would I like to receive?
What’s the
lowest
salary I’ll accept?
Are there any benefits (such as an expense account, medical and/or dental insurance, company car, etc.) I must or would like to have?
Am I planning to attend graduate school at some point in the future? If so, is it important that a tuition reimbursement plan be part of the company benefits package?
Is it important that the company have a formal employee-training program?

What Can You Learn from Past Jobs and Bosses?

For each job you’ve held in the past, describe those factors that made one enjoyable, satisfying, or rewarding and another boring, frustrating, or just plain hell. Be as specific as possible. Consider everything from the company’s location, the size of its (or your) offices, perks (or lack thereof), your subordinates and supervisors, responsibilities (or lack thereof), promotional opportunities, and hours.

The more comprehensive you make this analysis, the more easily you will begin to identify behavioral patterns. This exercise may help you hone in on a particular requirement (a corner office), something to avoid at all costs (a boss who’s passive-aggressive), or even some aspect of your own personality that you need to work on (lamenting a lack of promotional opportunities when you’ve never stayed at any job longer than six months!).

What can I learn from past bosses?
How well do I interact with authority figures—bosses, teachers, parents?

Even if every other aspect of a job is wonderful, you could be dying to move on just because you hate your boss. Hey, it happens. So before you extract yourself from the frying pan and deposit yourself directly into the fire, you might want to do the following exercise as well: Make a list of every boss you’ve ever had, using the broadest possible definition of “boss.” Divide them into three lists: those with whom you
never
had a problem, those with whom you had
some
problems, and those with whom you
always
seemed to have problems.

After you’ve developed these three lists, try to identify the common factors that would explain the problems you had with the third group. Were they all old, married, white men who smoked cigars? Were they all fast-charging sales types? Were they all bosses for the same kinds of companies (large, small, whatever)?

You get the idea. The more you know about the kinds of bosses under whom you’ve thrived and those beneath whom you’ve withered, the better chance you have of finding the right fit the next time around.

I’ll use myself (again) as an example: One of my early jobs in magazine publishing was as an advertising sales representative for a trade magazine. I was ambitious, passionate, and a very good salesperson. After teaching me about the basics of ad sales, my first boss pretty much kept out of the way and let me run. Boy, did I run! I set a single-year sales record that, I’ve been told, still stands.

Now, I didn’t exactly do everything by the book. In fact, I threw the book away. I ignored
all
requests to do memos or reports or anything that would have taken time away from making sales (i.e., making more money). I did not communicate; I did not summarize; I did not report. I just sold. After a short time, my boss simply stopped asking for that stuff and decided to revel in the big jump his own income was taking due to my unbridled efforts.

I did so well I got promoted to a bigger magazine, becoming the youngest sales manager in that company’s history. My old boss went to my new boss and sang my praises. But he also told her, in virtually these terms, to just
“let him the ___ alone. He’s a maverick and won’t follow any of your rules. He will make you a fortune, but he doesn’t need to learn anything from you. Just let him sell and motivate his salespeople to sell.”

Well, my new boss wasn’t nearly as flexible as my old boss had been (nor, obviously, as bright). Instead of adopting the recommended hands-off attitude, she wasted days of my time in a series of meetings explaining “how we do things at
this
magazine.” It was a disaster from the get-go, and it wasn’t long before it was made pretty clear (by the VP of Sales) that one of us was not going to be left standing.

A tremendous opportunity to move up to publisher of a major consumer travel publication materialized, as if on command. It represented a huge jump in responsibility and an equally huge jump in money. The only downside was that if I wanted the job, I would have to move to the Midwest, though my wife and I were confirmed New Yorkers. Plus, of course, she had a job she loved and informed me in no uncertain terms that she didn’t intend to sacrifice her career for mine. (Good for her!) If my new boss had simply followed my first boss’s advice, I probably would have turned down the job and continued on my well-planned rise at that trade publisher.

Well, she didn’t. So I had little choice. Luckily, my wife’s boss found a way for her to keep her job . . . and do it from the Midwest. So we moved. While the situation looked fantastic, it turned out to be a company in well-hidden trouble with
two
control-freak bosses (a husband and wife, no less) that I reported to. Within ten months, I was looking for a job again . . . and making the move back to the New York area . . . where no one particularly wanted to give me a job approaching the money or responsibility I had just had!

The result was a company called Career Press, which I founded not long thereafter, using my severance check from the Midwest. More than two decades later, it is a well-known publisher of 72 nonfiction books a year.

Now, I am not at all unhappy that things worked out the way they did. I became my own boss, and I have absolutely never regretted the unexpected path my career took. But it wasn’t exactly a free choice, was it? It started with a
promotion,
of all things. Did I ask
anything
about that first new boss? How compatible we were? Her style of management? Did I talk to anyone else who had worked for her? Did I talk to my predecessor in that position?

NO.

Did I ask about the salary and bonuses and special deals? Oh, you betcha I did.

It gets worse. Because I was in an untenable situation, the Midwest job looked like a godsend. Well, did I ask
anything
about my two new bosses before starting to pack? How compatible we were? Their (absolutely contradictory) styles of management? Did I talk to anyone else who had worked for them? Did I talk to my predecessor in that position?

You know the answers, right?

I do not handle authority well, something I guess I knew in my heart. But I never took the time to analyze myself enough to discover how essential a part of my nature it really was. Even after it caused one meltdown, I walked right into a second.

A single aspect of
your
personality can have a similar effect on your relationship with a boss or company. Take the time to know yourself well enough to at least anticipate a problem!

Don’t Wear Sandals at a White-Shoe Company

Birds of a feather
do
flock together. And different companies tend to attract particular “species” of employees. A company’s physical environment, management attitude and policies, and the personality of the “birds” that predominate, comprise its corporate culture. Is it a loose atmosphere with jean-clad creative types running amok? Or is it a buttoned-down, blue-suited autocracy with a long list of rules to follow during timed coffee breaks?

BOOK: 101 Smart Questions to Ask on Your Interview
4.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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