Establish your Value and Ace Interview Questions and Answers

How to prepare for an interview and identify the possible questions that will be asked is a question that every candidate goes through. At a broad level, you can expect that the questions will be in these two categories:

• Your experience and skills acquired in the last couple of years
• Skills and expertise required for the job you are hiring
• Value you can add to achieving the goals of your hiring manager

A survey stated by careermatch.com shows recruiter responses regarding what makes them hire a particular candidate during an in-person interview.

Have a look.

Source: https://www.careermatch.com/job-prep/career-insights/articles/how-to-ace-an-interview/

Given this background, most interview questions today are centered around the knowledge of the hiring manager and not around the skills of the candidate.

Over this article, we shall cover the types of interview questions, their traditional approach, and possible options to prove your credentials during an interview.

1. How are interviews conducted traditionally?
2. Types of Interview Questions
3. Common interview questions and answers
4. How do you prove your credentials in interviews?
5. Letters of recommendation VS getCREDIBLE
6. How to establish your potential and value during the interview

How are interviews conducted traditionally?

As discussed earlier, the traditional mindset is to ask questions based on the knowledge of the hiring manager. The hiring manager believes resumes are self portrayed and there is no feedback or recommendation of your skills by your current managers or colleagues.

This puts more pressure on the hiring manager and naturally, people tend to rely on their strengths in these pressure situations. Also, the focus shifts to a Q&A mode than qualitative conversations. Candidate very rarely gets a chance to engage in value conversations during the interview.

This scenario is not beneficial to the candidate and to hire.

It is because the quality conversation on how the candidate can help with the future job responsibilities is reduced or lost due to excessive time spent on validating past skills and expertise.

There are three important elements to a hiring process and the questions and answers will be around these points:

1. Skills and expertise of the candidate in the last couple of years
2. Roles and Responsibilities of the potential job
3. How can the candidate be successful in the potential job using a combination of existing skills and be groomed to fill the gaps for the new job?

Before we head into its details, let us understand the types of questions that come up in an interview.

What are the types of Interview Questions?

Your interview could go in any direction. You could be faced with tough interview questions. But there is a pattern to the kind of questions that are asked, and can be classified into the following:

• Behavioral Questions - This kind of question seeks to outline your past behavior to see as potential markers of your future behavior. Also, it targets attitudes towards various factors present in the working environment.



Some questions include “How did you manage to get that result?” or “What was your take on your company’s method of driving operations?”.

• Verification Questions- This is for ensuring your credentials and making sure that you are truthful and just within your resume. Apart from credentials, they also make sure of your professional experience in fields they are concerned about.

Examples include “What were your tasks in that position?” and “How long were you at ___?”.

• Opinion Questions - The purpose of these questions is to analyze your actions under specific situations. They do so by giving hypothetical scenarios. Also, they carry out the general strengths and weaknesses interview, to determine where to use you resourcefully, where you have an opportunity to grow, and if the weaknesses for job interviews seriously hinder the scope of employment.

An example is “What is your greatest weakness?”

• Mathematical & Competency Questions - Through many brain-teasing questions, this measures mathematical ability and problem-solving skills. Furthermore, it seeks to associate your behaviors with specific competencies related to work.

Questions include “Can you give me an example of your leadership skills” or “How did you achieve your goal for last year?

• Nonsensical Questions - These questions would be directed at how you manage to stay on your feet and how you are able to tackle questions.
You may face absurd questions like “Which Pokemon would you want to be and why?” or “What color describes you best?”

What are some Common Interview Questions?

Be it online interview questions and answers or whether it is targeted to interview questions for freshers, it is important to learn what to expect:

1. Tell me about yourself


2. Why do you want to work at this company?


3. What are your biggest strengths?


4. What are your biggest weaknesses?


5. Why should we hire you?


6. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?


7. Why do you want to leave your current job?


8. Tell me about a time you made a mistake.


9. What can we expect from you in the first three months?


10. What do you like to do outside of work?

The focus of hiring managers is to get through as many questions as possible from these regular stereotype questions to gauge the skill of the candidate. The focus is very little on the future value which is not beneficial to the candidate and manager

In order to change that to a value conversation, the candidate must prove beyond doubt the skills and expertise acquired so far with external validations from professional colleagues.

How do you prove your credentials?

It is critical to proving your credentials to the recruiter or hiring manager for them to spend less time on your skills and expertise in the past years. Most hiring managers do that anyway since there is no information in resumes. Be it providing any external validations or being completely self portrayed.

We can change that by adding external feedback or validations to your resume. There are two ways by which you can do that, which are:

1. Including recommendations from your professional ecosystem in your resume
2. Using a platform like getCREDIBLE to provide validations

Letters of Recommendations

Including recommendations or feedback from your professional acquaintances into your resume is a simple way to add to the credibility of your resume. The following are some challenges due to which most of them don’t include them in resumes:

• Maintaining a consistent format for all recommendations to make it easier for the hiring manager to read and understand.
• Proving that the feedback is authentic and not manipulated. It is very difficult to give full confidence. However, the confidence can be increased by including the contact information for the people providing recommendations.
• Time required to contact the person, explain your career aspirations and have them write one takes time. Due to this time constraint getting even 3 recommendations is a challenge.

While there are some challenges, including them in your resume will add additional credibility to your resume.

getCREDIBLE Platform

getCREDIBLE is a SaaS platform designed to establish professional credibility for all professionals. This platform helps you to engage with all your professional acquaintances in an easy way and get their feedback. The good part is all feedback is anonymous and unsolicited giving 100% confidence that these are fully authentic feedback which is very important in the professional world. This platform also validates all users, giving an additional level of confidence.

You can establish your credibility in 3 easy steps:

1. Sign up in the getCREDIBLE platform, invite your professional acquaintances and tag your relationship (one-time activity)
2. Post your monthly accomplishments as milestones and your feedback for others
3. Design and publish your digital resume (Slate) with your validated credentials

All the above activities can be completed in around 15 minutes per week and the platform is free to use. getCREDIBLE also provides you with the technology to design and configure a digital version of your resume called “Slate” that is interactive, timeline-based, and foolproof.

Letters of Recommendation Vs getCREDIBLE

We discussed the two alternatives to establish your credentials, the following table gives you the feature comparison to help you make an informed decision:

Hopefully, this information can help you to decide on the right approach for you

How to establish your potential and value during the interview

Having established your credibility for the skills and expertise for the past year, you can have a quality discussion on the future potential and value you bring to the organization. To do that effectively focus on the following three points:

• Research the goals of the organization
You can do that using online information from the LinkedIn, website, YouTube channels looking for information about the company’s strategy and vision along with what Sr people in the organization are saying
• How can you help them realize their goals?
Prepare for the meeting by coming up with a plan on how you can help them realize their goals using the skills and expertise you have acquired over the last several years and the foundation you have built.
• Prepare for possible questions around your plan
Prepare for potential questions that may come up around your plan and strategy. In this way, the conversation will be very focused and it will be easier for you to prepare as opposed to going into the meeting open-ended.