Hi, it's Duncan Brodie here from Goals and Achievements.
In this video, I want to talk about how to answer questions in job interviews.
Because you see, one of the things I notice is that even amongst highly capable individuals whether accountants or other professionals, they can often struggle when it comes to answering questions in job interviews.
And I think part of the reason for that is that people don't understand the different lines of questioning and how to approach them.
And in many respects, your lines of questions can actually fall into three categories.
The first category is how what type question?
And if you get ask the question, how would you do this or what would you do in this type of situation?
What you want to do is essentially take them through exactly what you would do step by step in some detail so that's the first line question.
The second line of question is when they actually ask for a particular example and typically they'll ask you to tell them about a time when you've dealt with a difficult customer, difficult colleague, tell me about a time when you've supported change.
Give me an example of when you've helped another member of the team.
Describe a time when you delivered whilst you were under pressure.
And the trick to answering that question is to use something called the STAR approach.
Where you briefly describe the situation, outline the task it was to be achieved, set out in some detail the actions you took and then summarise by covering the result that you got.
And the final line of question is why type question.
And a why type question really is an opportunity for you to pitch yourself.
Um, so typically, you know, why are you the ideal candidate? Why should we appoint you? This is an invitation to pitch yourself.
So really, what you want to do is you want to come up with about five to seven really compelling reasons why you the ideal person.
And try and make those, uh, examples as closely aligned to the requirements of the job as you can.
So that's my thoughts on how to answer questions in job interviews.
Remember there's really kind of three lines of questions.
Understand those and approach the answers in the right way and you're going to do an awful lot better in the job interview.