Find Out The Best Answers to These Challenging Interview Questions

Business LoungeJuly 9, 2017

Who does not dread an interview? No one, for sure. However, interviews are inevitable—at least if you want to land a job. To find the right person to fill a vacant position, all companies require an applicant to undergo an interview to determine his or her skills while getting to know him or her better.

If you are looking for a job, you have no choice but to face your interviewers. Therefore, you need to be ready to answer all questions that may be asked to you and answer them right. However, besides feeling nervous, the challenging nature of the questions could make you give up. Should you be brutally honest and thus expose your weaknesses? Or should you lie just to land the job? We give you a guide on how to respond to some of the interview questions.

“During job interviews, when they ask: ‘What is your worst quality?’, I always say: ‘Flatulence.’ That way I get my own office.” — Dan Thompson

Tell Us About an Instance Where You Failed, and You Were Ashamed

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This question can be challenging because the subject is your weakness, and your flaws may turn off your potential employer. However, the key to answering this question is to turn your failure into success. For instance, share about a situation where you made a mistake, but emphasize how well you handled the incident— with calmness, how you admitted your mistake and took accountability for it. Also, mention how you learned from the mistake.

What is your biggest weakness?

Now this can be a very challenging question and how you answer it will determine whether or not you land the job. Nonetheless, remember that as a human being, you have your strengths and weaknesses. Here, be honest and say what your weakness is. However, mention how you are in control of and can you can cope up with your weakness by stating how you manage to overcome it.

Your potential employer deserves to know in which field you excel and where you face difficulties so that they determine what training you should undergo. However, he or she must see how willing and determined are you to learn new things, expand your horizon and knowledge base to cope with the company’s demands. For example, you can say that you’re weak in Graphic Designing, but if you are given a chance, you are willing to undergo training in Photoshop and Illustrator to improve your skills.

Have You Ever Been Fired? If so, Why?

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If you have never been fired, this question should be easy to answer. But if you have, that is where the struggle begins. If you are still bitter with your former boss, this is not the place to express your bitterness. You don’t want your future employer to have a negative impression of you, do you? Blaming your past employer will make your future boss think that you will also do that to them once you leave.

The best answer to this question is to simply say that you were no longer fit to the company. Say that you needed a more challenging job that would enable you to utilize all your skills. Another suitable option is to say that somehow your personal and professional goals were no longer aligned with the company’s goals and mission anymore.

Explain the Gaps In Your Resume

Gaps in your working experience can be due to many reasons, but your future employer may want to know why you stopped working for a year or two before resume work. In this case, just be honest and tell them that you needed to take care of something—could be your family. You may also have been injured or hospitalized, so you could not work.

However, emphasize that you are still updated in your field of expertise. Explain to them that during your free time, you learned a new programming language or how to use new software. This is because your employer wants to know that you are still honing your skills.