Posted on 06/10/2011 11:37:53 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
There are a couple questions that everyone dreads in an interview.
"What is your greatest weakness?" "Where do you see yourself in five years?" and "Tell me about yourself." It's the default question (and the first) in most interviews, and to many candidates, it can feel like a trap.
So we spoke with executive headhunters and career coaches about how best to answer this question. "They want to gauge how the person thinks," says Eileen Finn, president of executive search firm Eileen Finn & Associates in New York.
Even though there is no one right answer, focusing on the past, the negative, or the too personal can hurt your chances of making it through.
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(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
No.
Ding Ding Ding!
I’m actually ashamed that I wasted that many electrons by clicking that link.
Well....It all started when I was a Merc for a small Afician nation.This job doesnt have any branches in the Congo, because I am still wanted there.
My response "In the black." I didn't getr the job ...
By the way, you’re out of milk.
What is your greatest weakness?
Choking people who ask mundane interview questions.
Tell me about yourself.
Which one?
Where do you see yourself in five years?
I’ll be a billionaire because, according to you, I can see the future.
Who is your hero?
My dog. He can lick his own balls.
I hate freagin tips. There are sooo many tipsters trying to tell me things these days from the media that it is nauseating. Granted, I like the ready availability of information from google and the like. But I like to pull the info, not have it pushed at me.
Oh, I totally sympathize. When I had to interview candidates for attorney jobs, the interviews were “thrown in” on top of an already busy day. It wasn’t as though my OTHER workload was somehow lightened that day to allow me to prep for the interview. :)
My turn:
What is your greatest weakness?
Not being bright enough to avoid answer interview questions from HR drones.
Tell me about yourself.
I’m flattered, but I’m married.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
In rather vivid dreams.
Who is your hero?
(Seriously, on this one, I simply don’t answer it — I’m influenced by many who each have been influenced by many. How can you give credit to just one, or even a handful?)
Ahhhhh, so you DO understand...
Sometimes, I find myself giving so much it hurts, I say stop. I’m the only one that really knows the truth, I’ld love to share it with you, but, ...
The best interview advice I received was how to deal with the dreaded “what kind of salary are you looking for?” question.
You turn it back on them by asking “what is the range for this position?”
It really works.
To me, this question has always just meant, “Go into your dance.” They don’t really care about learning the facts about yourself—the important ones are in the resume. What they want is to see how you express yourself, what your personality is like, and how you sell yourself. And whether you can deal with the ambiguity of an open-ended question.
“what is your greatest weakness?”
Chocolate
“where do you see yourself in 5 years”
Broke, diabetic and lacking health insurance because your company is going to cut it due to obamacare, right after you lay off half the workforce because operations moved overseas and you outsourced your entire IT department to a small company in India who sub contracted to a small company in Vietnam who was accused by Barbara Streisand of using child labor to write complex c++ programs for business applications that don’t work, but I digress. OHHHHHHHHH OHHHHHHH. What was the question again?
“tell me something about yourself”
I am pretty level headed.
These are my favorite type questions to ask when interviewing candidates. In my case I usually put it this way.
“What’s up with you....what’s the (so and so) story?”
I find framing it in the third person tends to open some up to be more chatty and others, particularly those unable to think on their feet, it completely knocks them off their game because they have not scripted answer. Had one engineering candidate sit and stare at the table for two minutes before he could come up with something to say.
Answers like that are what a certain 50 yr old man-child asst. supervisor of a technical section wanted to know about me everyday. The guy had no home life, no friends, no gf or wife, a deranged sister, and was a big time liberal.
I have a mental list of 5 things I want to tell an interviewer, reduced to sound-bites. If they give me that opening, I launch.
Works every time.
LOL. When I ask a question like that when I interview someone, its because I can’t think of anything else and I’m stalling for time.
What’s your greatest strength?
Well, if you tie a cord around my ____, I can lift a bowling ball when I get excited.
Tell me about your favorite supervisor.
That would be Steve. He didn’t struggle much and tasted like chicken.
Tell me about a successful team that you were part of.
Well...I was on the 2002 NBA Champion Los Angeles Laker basketball team.
Really?
Sh_t no. I was hoping you weren’t a basketball fan.
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