I'm Don Varney of Varney Speaks and on behalf of Expert Village. Today we're going to talk
about the interview process. Let's take a moment and talk about some of the types of
questions that you could be asked during the interview process. Sometimes the questions
are misleading because we're taking them personally when they're really talking professionally.
A good example would be if they were to say to you, tell me about yourself. You're sitting
there saying, well I like to go hunting on the weekends. I like to go camping and take
my family fishing, and I really enjoy that. Well, great answer, but that's not what they're
asking. When they say tell me about yourself, they are asking you to tell them about yourself
in this job environment. They want to hear I enjoying coming to work with people that
I get around and I have a good time with. I like an atmosphere of friendliness. Your
company being a company that specializes in public relations and customer service, well
this is the environment that I like and it would work well for me to work well in your
environment. That would me in line with what they're really asking when they say tell me
about yourself. When they ask about strengths and weaknesses, again, they're not asking
you for you to really tell them I'm very good at this and I'm weak at this, but in essence,
they may be asking you about how that would apply to the work force, to the workplace
where you are actually going to go to work. One of the simplest examples is you might
say, I was told early on in my career that listening was a weakness. I didn't listen
very well because I was always ready to answer whatever it was they were saying. The good
news was they were right and I figured that out, so what I've done now is I've taken a
weakness of not listening very well. I've taken classes on it, I've read books on it,
I've done studies on it, and over the last few years what I've determined is I really
wasn't a good listener, but now I really trained myself to understand the importance to listening
to the person before I try to answer.