Cultural/HR Interview Questions
You’re interviewing for a position that requires a specialized, technical skill set, but that doesn’t mean that only your vocational merits will get you the job offer. You’re likely still going to have conversations where the focus is not on your technical skills but on your interpersonal and communication skills. Employers want to figure out if you’re a person they want to spend 40+ hours with every week. They’re looking for a person who is confident, can connect with people, and can create a narrative of their history and background that is easy to understand.
Generally we have found that if you prepare answers to the below non-technical questions, that you’ll be ready for most interview questions that are thrown your way:
Tell me about yourself. (Also called “30-second pitch” or “elevator pitch”) Most important to nail down
Why do you want to be a [your intended profession]?
What are you looking for (in a job, in your next step)?
Walk me through your career history/background.
What have you built/created?
What intrigued you about this role or company?
What are your salary expectations?
What did you learn in this program/How was your experience in Flatiron School’s program? [Some behavioral/competency based questions, i.e “Tell me about a time when you…” or “Share an example of a time you [did X]…”)
What questions do you have for me?
Non-technical interview questions are always asked by HR professionals and recruiters. However, you can expect team/company leaders who interview you to ask these sorts of questions as well.
Decoding Common Interview Questions
Tell me about yourself.
Decoded: Who are you and how well can you speak about it?
Base your answer on the elevator pitch you prepared.
This is often the first question that an interviewer asks you, so be prepared to start off with your elevator pitch. In a formal interview setting, prepare to talk for longer than 30 seconds. Using one to two minutes to expand upon the narrative of your elevator pitch is totally fine.
Once you’ve mastered your answer to this, it will set a strong foundation for many other questions throughout your interview. Your answer for this should consist of your 30-second elevator pitch (as referenced in an earlier lesson) and contain a very brief chronological overview of:
What you were doing before Flatiron School
Where are you now (what your excited to be learning and doing at Flatiron School)
Where you're going (looking towards your career future)
When answering this question, keep in mind that your interviewer is not only listening to your words but is also paying attention to how you say the words and the way you look when saying them. The interviewer not only cares about the content but how you craft the narrative of connecting your various experiences. Regardless of whether you’ve climbed the ranks at an accounting firm or you’ve bounced around to different jobs over the past 5 years, you can create a smooth story of how you’ve moved through each job or experience. If you own that story and speak passionately, it doesn’t matter where you come from.
Note: While we call this a 30-second elevator pitch, in an actual job interview you do have the liberty to make the pitch a little longer to ensure you are highlighting the most relevant and transferable skills and experiences from your career journey that make you a qualified candidate for the role, and so that you are able to do so enthusiastically and natural. In other words, you shouldn’t feel rushed or distracted by worrying, “How many seconds is this taking?”, which can make you appear as anxious and not fully present. However, do still be mindful of time and keep it as close to 30 seconds as possible.
Why are you interested in [your field of study]? / Why do you want to be a [your intended profession]?
Decoded: Are you really serious about this career shift and is it genuine? Prove to me you want this because you love your field of study and not because you’re bored in your old job or want to make more money.
It’s crucial that you don’t give credit to someone else for your decision to get into your chosen profession. You need to internalize this career choice you have made, and be able to express with genuineness and passion WHY. Especially as a career changer, companies will be less willing to take a chance on investing in you if you can’t articulate why you are invested in this career choice.
Why are you so excited about this new career path? What has motivated or inspired you to get here? What was your AHA moment to make this transition? What is the special ‘connection’ you have to coding? These are the types of answers they are looking for.
It’s always best to be specific and tell a story about how you discovered this new profession. Maybe it started in a class in college or perhaps a family member introduced you to computers when you were a child. Or maybe you worked in the marketing department at a company and collaborated with professionals in your field of study on a project and got really intrigued with their work. Use imagery to bring the interviewer to that place in time that was your “aha!” moment -- when you knew that you wanted to make this vocation a major part of your life.
It’s often helpful to explain the effort you put in on your own to learn this new vocation before you arrived at Flatiron School. Did you watch YouTube? What tutorials/courses have you done? What books or blogs did you read?
What are you looking in a job?
Decoded: Don’t be fooled -- this still isn’t about you. This is your chance to demonstrate the ways you want to contribute to a company, not the place for you to ask for mentoring or to remind the employer of how junior you are.
Your answer should not be focused on what you want from the company, but rather what you can contribute to them. However you choose to respond to this question, make it centered around the company, not you.
It's fine to say you want to learn in your next job, but that can’t be the only thing you want out of a job.
An employer is thinking about paying you money to do what you've just studied and trained to do, which will likely be linked to that employer making money. What can you do to help this employer make money? Here you can talk about how your specific skills and passions can contribute to that.
Why shouldn't you ask explicitly for mentoring?
When you ask for mentoring from an employer they may misunderstand your abilities and presume that you need excessive supervision or that you cannot work independently. Asking for mentoring outright makes you appear less confident that you can get the job done yourself (of course you’ll have questions along the way, and that’s expected). Some companies have formal mentoring programs where new employees are paired with more senior employees, and in these cases, you can mention this but the focus of your answer should still be about how you can contribute to the company.
Walk me through your career history/Tell me about your professional background
Decoded: What have you done that’s impressive (professional, educational or travel-related) and why did you make the decisions and moves you did?
If you have a robust professional history, walk through what’s on your resume. If you’re less than 10 years out of college, start with school and then explain each job on your resume.
If you don’t have much of a professional history (or you’ve hopped around a lot), if you were a stay at home mom, or you traveled extensively, think about how to craft a chronological story around those experiences.
Here your interviewer is looking for a concise overview of your path to present day, regardless of what you’ve done. Be sure to showcase your transferable skills and experiences that are relevant and valuable to each position you interview for.
Your answer should not be a long-winded history of everything you’ve done; just highlight briefly the things that they will want to know about you that makes you a great fit for the role and company at hand, and give them the opportunity to dig deeper themselves and ask more detailed questions. Make it a goal to leave the interviewer wanting more.
NOTE: You might be asked about why you left certain jobs and why you took that job that came after that. Keep the following in mind:
Don’t speak ill of past employers
Don’t say you hated your boss
Don’t say you hated your job
Don’t say you were bored
Don’t say your colleagues were incompetent
Don’t say the company was poorly managed
Don’t say you weren’t paid enough money
Good reasons to explain why you left a job:
Found a better growth opportunity/new challenge elsewhere
Wanted to try a new industry/experience
Decided to pursue a passion
Etc.
If you were laid off or fired, below are a few ways to explain that elegantly. Remember to keep it very brief and do not complain or go into detail. If appropriate, share something you learned from the process. Most importantly, don't lie about it. If you're still processing the experience, especially if it was an emotional departure, be sure to talk with your coach and write a script to follow so you'll be prepared to explain how you left your last job. If you can move on quickly, the interviewer will too.
If you were laid off:
"I transitioned out of the role following a company restructure/downsizing. Soon after I started working at Company X."
"The company decided to close down the division I was a part of. Following that I found a great opportunity doing X at Company Y."
If you were fired:
"My manager and I decided to mutually part ways. I didn't fully understand their expectations when I started in the role."
"Regrettably, my performance didn't meet the company's expectations. Since then, I have reflected a lot on how I cam improve and am much more confident in my skills now."
What have you built/created?
Decoded: Do you know how to talk about your trade? How well do you understand how a project is built from ideation to creation? How well can you present that understanding to different audiences?
When you’re asked this question, the interviewer wants to gauge your depth of understanding of what you’ve been studying. Taking an assessment alone doesn’t make you an expert or qualify you to be working in that vocation.
No matter who your audience is, the best way to approach answering this question is to ask yourself “what problem is this project solving?” Start your answer by presenting this question, followed by explaining how you approached building the solution, including each feature's purpose and what technologies/tools were used to build each feature.
If your interviewer is an HR or recruiting professional, don’t get too deep into technical jargon that likely won’t be familiar to them, possibly making them confused and distracted. Instead, briefly touch on why you built each feature and what mini problems they solve without getting into technical details.
If your interviewer is a technical professional, you will have to go more in depth. In this case, refer to the tips in our lesson in this track on talking about what you’ve created.
What intrigued you about this role or company?
Decoded: Prove to me that you truly are in invested in what we are about, and that you don’t want just any job; that you want this job! Show me that you mean what you say. Make me feel you care (about us).
This is a great question by which smart companies quickly weed out tire kickers. They may also ask you something like “What do you know about us? Tell me what you know about our company.
What are you salary expectations?
Decoded: Do your salary expectations align with our company’s budget for this role? Are we wasting our time?
This is a very important question! In The Salary Question lesson below you will find a fully flushed out response full of helpful information to navigate an appropriate response.
What questions do you have for me (the interviewer)?
Decoded: Did you do your research? Do you care? Were you engaged in our conversation? Do you understand standard expectations of interview behavior?
You absolutely need to have questions for your interviewer, no exceptions. Ask thoughtful questions that show your interviewer you have done thorough research to understand the company and its needs (refer to our earlier lesson on Doing Research Before an Interview) and you are genuine, passionate and committed to contributing to the company. See the earlier lesson Preparing Questions for Interviewers for strategies to develop your questions.
Answering Behavioral Interview Questions
In addition to the types of questions listed above, nearly all companies will also ask you more in-depth behavioral or competency based questions. These types of questions play a large part in how companies assess your abilities and overall fit, so it is critical that you can easily recognize them and be prepared to answer them effectively. You can recognize behavioral questions by the following common verbiage:
Tell me about a time when you… [resolved a conflict on a team/project]. Share an example of when you… [managed competing priorities simultaneously]. How would you...[tell a client something they didn’t want to hear]?
In behavioral questions a company will ask about your past work experiences in order to find out if you have the specific skills needed for the job. Behavioral interview questions focus on how you handled various work situations in the past (or sometimes, how you would hypothetically handle a situation in the future). Your response will reveal your skills, abilities, and personality, and ultimately, your ‘fit’ in their work environment/culture. The logic behind this interview tactic is that your past behavior reflects and predicts how you will behave in the future.
How to Approach Your Answer
Your answer to a behavioral interview question should be concise, yet with enough detail, so the interviewer easily understands the situation you are describing, from start to finish. Think of it as you are telling them a mini story, in which you are the protagonist/main character.
One common mistake job seekers make is they get caught up in thinking, “Is my answer right or wrong?” or “The company is trying to stump me with this question!” In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Companies aren’t looking for specific, pre-defined answers, and they for certain aren’t trying to ‘stump’ you; what they are looking for are examples of how you behave in the workplace, under different circumstances.
As the interviewee, you actually have a huge advantage here, as you control the narrative, choosing what elements to share and not share. What’s most important is that you pay close attention to specifically what they are asking, and then to give an example of that, in a chronological, concise, yet detailed order. One technique that will help you immensely in formulating and articulating your answers to behavioral interview questions is the STAR method.
Using the STAR Method
The STAR method will be your best tool and ally in behavioral interview questions. Use it to both craft your answers in your mind and then to articulate them out loud in your answer. The STAR method is built around a chronological, specific, results focused format. Specifically, the STAR method breaks down into:
S (Situation) = Describe the background situation/circumstances in which the example took place. T (Task) = Describe the task at hand and/or particular problem or issue to be resolved [avoid judgemental statements and just stick to the facts]. A (Action) = Explain the specific action/s you took to complete the task/solve the problem. R (Result) = Explain the results of your action. For example, if your actions resulted in completing a task, resolving a conflict, improving your company’s sales record, etc., explain this. Focus on how your actions resulted in a success for the team/company (if this is not possible, then focus on what you learned/gained from the experience).
Below are examples of behavioral interview questions and answers using STAR.
Example Question 1: Tell me about a time you had to complete a task under a tight deadline. Describe the situation, and explain how you handled it.
Example Answer 1: While I typically like to plan my work out in stages and complete it piece by piece, I can also achieve strong work results under a tight deadline. Once at [Company], an employee left days before a big project of his was due. I was asked to take it over, with only a few days to learn about and complete the project. I created a task force, delegated work, and we all completed the assignment with a day to spare.
Example Question 2: What do you do when a team member refuses to complete his or her portion of the work?
Example Answer 2: When there are team conflicts or issues, I always try my best to step up as team leader if needed. I think my communication skills make me an effective leader and moderator. For example, once I was working on a team project, and two of the team members got into an argument, both refusing to complete their assignments. They were both dissatisfied with their workloads, so I arranged a team meeting where we rearranged the assignments for the team. This made everyone happier and more productive, and our project was a success, receiving praise from our supervisor.
Be As Prepared as Possible
As you can see, the STAR method is a highly effective and simple technique for optimizing your behavioral interview answers. In addition to using this method on site in an interview, you should also incorporate STAR into your pre-interview preparation. First and foremost, read each job description in detail line by line, paying close attention to the responsibilities and qualifications the company is asking for. Then, think of specific examples in which you did those things, embodied those skills, or exuded traits that are relevant and transferable. Better yet, write your examples down and keep them as handy reference for future interviews. That way you'll be prepared ahead of time, rather than having to think of a response on the spot during the interview. Be sure to customize your preparation for every interview since each and every company will be unique.
To ensure you are as prepared as possible, you can also google a list of behavioral interview questions on the internet to get a sense of the diversity of questions you can potentially expect, such as ‘What is your greatest strength?’, ‘What are you most proud of?’, or ‘How do you use data to solve problems?’ Sometimes you can find examples of the actual interview questions that companies have asked on sites like glassdoor.
Resources
9 Things Interviewers Never Tell Job Candidates, But Should
30 Behavioral Interview Questions to Identify High-Potential Candidates
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