Ron Fry - 101 Smart Questions to ask on Your Interview

1. Introduction
   How to Be a Great Prospect
2. Chapter 1
   When, Where, Why, and How to Ask Smart Questions
3. Chapter 2
   Questions to Ask Yourself
4. Chapter 3
   Questions to Ask During Your Research
5. Chapter 4
   Questions to Ask "Preinterviewers"
6. Chapter 5
   Questions to Ask Your New Boss
7. Chapter 6
   Questions to Close the Sale
8. Chapter 7
   Questions to Get the Best Deal
9. Appendix A
   20 Great Answers to the Toughest Interview Questions
10. Appendix B
    Smart Questions to Ask
11. Epilogue
    Questions That Get Real

Introduction

How to Be a Great Prospect

Todays economy requires job hunters to be more proactive, more sophisticated, and more willing to go through brick walls to get what they want. Employers no longer plan your career for you. You must look after yourself, and know what you want and how to get it.

Kate Wendleton, Interviewing and Salary Negotiation

M ost job candidates think of the interview in completely the wrong way. They think of it as an interrogation, a police lineup. And they see themselves as suspects, not as the key prospects they really are.

This book will show you that you are, to a very large degree, in charge of the interview. It will convince you that you are there not only to sell the company on you, but to make sure that you are sold on them. It will give you the powerful questions that will work whatever your age, whatever your experience, whatever your goals.

It will not, however, spend very much time preparing you for the questions the interviewer is going to throw at you. Luckily for you (why am I so good to you?), Ive already written the companion book to this one 101 Great Answers to the Toughest Interview Questions whose sole purpose is to do exactly that. (Not only did I already write it, Ive revised it five times, and it has sold well over one million copies.) Using these two books together, you will be amply armed for any interview and any interviewer.

Even though I think you should buy a copy of my other book, I am going to reveal a secret that may cost me sales: There really arent 101 questions you have to prepare yourself for. Not even a dozen. There are only five questions interviewers desperately want to know your answers to:

Can you do the job?

Do you have the specific qualifications Im seeking? Do you have the right degree? The right experience? The appropriate skills?

Will you do the job

better than the other people Im interviewing? Prove to me that youre the best person for the job.

Will you actually take the job if I offer it to you?

How hungry are you? How much do you actually want this specific job? Or are you so desperate youll take any job even this one?

Even if you are perfectly qualified and highly motivated, do I think you will fit in with the rest of the group?

The smaller the company or department, the more important this chemistry question becomes. In a one- or two-person office, it may be the key question.

Will you make me, the interviewer, look like a genius for recommending or hiring you?

Or will your miscues and missteps make me look like an idiot, kill my promotion, slash my bonus, maybe even jeopardize my own job? (The higher up on the food chain the interviewer is, the more central this question becomes to her.)

Will you ever be asked these questions? Probably not. You will be asked dozens of questions about your strengths and weaknesses, your successes and failures, your plans and ideas. Just remember: The answers to these five questions is what all the other questions are really trying to ascertain.

Why Ask Questions?

Crafting concise, targeted, enthusiastic, and positive responses to the interviewers questions gives you an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge of the company and industry and show how your qualifications would help you fit right in. Asking concise, targeted, and well-crafted questions gives you additional chances to demonstrate the extent of your research, to build on whatever rapport youve established, and to align what you know and can do with what the company needs.

These questions, by their very nature, proclaim that you are interested. Likewise, the complete lack of questions will undoubtedly convince most interviewers that you are not interested.

Oh, you were interested? You just didnt have any questions. Sorry, interviewers dont consider that an option. No questions? No job offer. Thats certainly a rule with a vast majority of interviewers. (No, no, please, dont try the but the interviewer was so good that he answered all my questions bit. Doesnt work. Wouldnt be prudent. Not going to go there.)

As Im going to emphasize throughout this book, asking questions the smart way is just another way to match your skills, talents, and qualifications to the companys needs; its another opportunity to demonstrate that you are far and away the only candidate the interviewer should consider. By preceding many of your questions with a phrase or statement that reminds the interviewer of something you said earlier or a point you want to continually reemphasize, its another chance to blow your own horn:

Mr. Jones, as my stint at Eubonics, Inc. clearly showed, I have the ability to motivate a team to overachieve, but could you tell me a little more about the individuals Id be working with here?

How to Construct Smart Questions

Let me save the obsessive-compulsives among you some timethere are far more than 101 smart questions in this book. How do I know (because I didnt count them!)? While there may be 101 general questions in the book (although I think there are quite a few more), there are a near-infinite number of specific, qualifying, clarifying questions you can ask. I intend to point you in the right direction, but the details of such questions are going to be determined by your exact situation, by what youve already said during the interview, and by what the interviewer has already said. How much (or little) research youve done will also expand (or limit) the depth and breadth of your questions.

Heres an example of how to construct dozens of great questions after asking a general question and receiving a relatively innocuous reply from the interviewer:

You: Mr. Barton, I noticed in the latest issue of Publishers Weekly that you intend to increase the number of books you publish next year from 50 to 72.