I recently came across an online product that offers customers 450 answers to popular interview questions and it got me to thinking about the value of such a product.
In general terms, many people think that memorizing answers to interview questions is a good way to ensure that you’re “giving employers what they want to hear” as if this is the purpose of an interview.
When I came across this product, even though the product wasn’t advertised in this way, this was the impression I got. I felt that many people who would purchase such a product would end up feeling like they needed to memorize the answers to the popular or common interview questions that give people trouble like:
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Why did you leave your last job?
How much money are you looking for?
Tell me about yourself (not even a question per se but something that does get asked quite frequently during interviews nonetheless!)
The problem with memorizing answers to interview questions is that quite often it becomes fairly obvious that you’ve memorized the answers and you come across sounding very scripted, something that certainly doesn’t help your cause in any way.
It also brings to mind other concerns that arise when you try to memorize answers or even use phrases and lines that were written by someone else and pass them off as your own:
People interpret things differently: Not everyone looks at things the same way. We interpret things differently, we place different degrees of importance on things and evaluate things differently from one another. Just because someone offers you an answer to an interview question, doesn’t mean the interviewer you give the answer to will interpret your answer positively. We already discussed this in December in an earlier post.
You can’t predict what you will be asked: Unless you are given a list of the questions you are going to be asked during the interview beforehand, how many questions do you plan on memorizing or “learning” the answers to to ensure you’ve covered all of them? Certainly, unless you’ve got a photographic memory, it’s going to be difficult to learn how to remember the answers to 450 interview questions in the case of the product I mentioned above.
Furthermore, what’s the point?
During an average interview, maybe you only get asked 10-15 questions anyways, so how you can figure out which of the 450 questions to concentrate on?
The best thing you can do is understand ahead of time how you will answer questions that you typically get answered during the interview process. In general terms a hiring manager wants to know how you’ve progressed during your career, what you’ve accomplished, why you have left each job, what you’ve learned, and what you offer them – the employer – if they were to hire you.
The other obvious thing you can do is ensure that you can comfortably discuss everything that it is actually contained in your resume! This may sound obvious but I’ve interviewed people who were taken by surprise when I referred to something in their resume and they suddenly remembered that they’d made a change to their resume and had forgotten that they’d mentioned the point that I was referring to. Certainly, interviews can be stressful but you need to ensure that you are familiar with all the dates and numbers and accomplishments that you’ve quoted in your resume otherwise you risk looking like someone who is embellishing or flat out lying.
In summary, looking to see how other people have answered various interview questions and getting advice from them is not a bad thing assuming the person you’re getting the advice from knows what they are talking about but at the end of the day, no one knows you better than yourself. Your answers to interview questions should reflect you and not simply be a mishmash of quotes and lines that you’ve lifted from other people.
