You can prepare as much as possible, but recruiters may challenge you to step off your rehearsed script.
According to Forbes, “hiring managers are increasingly using creative, unscripted questions to assess essential soft skills like critical thinking, adaptability, and emotional intelligence.”
So, if you can’t predict every question, how will you be ready to answer them?
When they ask you things like a time when you were wrong about something, for example, they’re trying to see if you can talk about your weaknesses honestly.
It requires you to demonstrate your ability to reflect and your level of self-awareness. Above all, it’s about what you learned from your mistakes.
Forbes gives an example of using the STAR method to answer such questions, but keeping it natural and straightforward:
“‘At my last job, I was convinced that weekly status meetings were necessary. However, after testing async updates, productivity actually increased by 15%. I realized I was holding onto a habit that wasn’t effective anymore.’”
It’s important to prepare for an interview and to think about how to answer certain questions. But, a good exercise when job searching is to reflect on your experiences and be aware of the lessons you learned from them.
Also, look into your weaknesses and failures, own them, and think about the steps you’ve taken over the years to overcome them.
This’ll get you ready to answer tricky questions the next time you meet a recruiter.
Now, let us know, what was one unexpected question you faced during an interview?