Alli Peck, a career advisor with 10 years in medical-device program management, breaks down three interview staples. For "Tell me about yourself," use Present-Past-Future in 4 sentences max. For behavioral questions, structure your answer as Situation, Task, Action, Result, Lessons learned, and land on a concrete lesson you took away.
Do you know how to answer the three most common interview questions the right way? If not, don't worry, I'm going to tell you. My name is Allison Peck and I'm a career advisor. If you need help navigating your treacherous career development path, I can help. With my 10 years of experience as a mechanical engineer and program manager for medical device companies in the Bay Area of California, I've learned a thing or two about interviewing resumes and how to excel in your job in general. So let's get into what you came for. How to answer the three most common interview questions the right way Question number one one Arguably the most common interview question asked, oftentimes the first question ever asked. Tell us a little bit about yourself now. The biggest mistake I see people making with this is rambling. Try to make this be four sentences max. The second mistake I see people making with this is going in chronological order. I was born on a dark and stormy night back in November of 1988. Yada yada yada. Nobody wants to hear your life story. I always answer this question in the format Present, Past, future. But what does that mean? I'll give you an example. I'm currently a senior program manager for a blood testing company in Seattle. I have 10 previous years of experience working for other medical device companies, especially under FDA regulation. My goal in the future is to help teams communicate cross functionally in an organization and help those teams reach their goals. See, that wasn't so hard, was it? That was three or four sentences. I talked about my current role present. I talked about the past, my experience, and I talked about the future, my goals. So that is my tip for answering the first interview question you will probably be asked. Now let's talk about the second one. Tell us why you're job searching. Another form that this question can come in is why did you leave your previous role? Or why did you apply to work for our company now, depending on your current employment status. Whether you're unemployed or not dictates how this is going to be answered. So let's first talk about if you're currently working at a company and you're job searching at a different one. First rule of thumb is always, always, always stay positive. Don't talk crap about your old manager, don't talk crap about your and don't say anything negative about how it's not a great fit, or how you're not having a good time or you're working for a micromanager or it's a toxic culture. You can say something that's vague but still answers your question, such as I'm really interested in growth opportunities and I'm not seeing that as a possibility in my current role. Keep it light, keep it vague, and keep it positive. Now let's talk about how you'd answer that question. If you are currently unemployed, like you quit your last company before getting a new job or you were laid off or fired. Now you still want to keep it positive even though it may not have been a positive situation for you. You could say something like this. There were layoffs happening at my previous role and unfortunately my department was affected. However, since I was laid off, I have been taking courses on LinkedIn and brushing up my skills and I'd love to share about how I've done that and how that makes me an excellent candidate for this role now. Disclaimer if you're going to say something like that, it's gotta be true. Don't lie. I never condone lying in an interview. However, if you really did laid off, hopefully you've still been staying up on the latest trends in your industry, maybe brushing up on some skills, maybe reading some articles or some books. And notice how I also kept it positive and I led into another question as to take control of the conversation and turn it in a direction that you want to move forward in. Let me show you how I'm qualified for this role. So that's how to answer question number two. The third most common interview type question that you'll be asked is tell us about a time when something didn't go right and how you resolved it. Or another form this question can be in is tell us when you had a conflict with a co worker and what happened or tell us about a time when something didn't go right with your project and how you dealt with it. Now what this question is trying to get to the root of is we don't want to hear what went right in your previous experience. We want to hear what went horribly wrong and how you've dealt with it. Because things will go wrong. And this company is trying to see how you work under pressure, under stress, under not ideal conditions. So here's how you're going to answer this question. A lot of people say to use the Star Method, Situation, Task, Action, result, but I have coined the term Starle Method, Situation, Task Action, result. Lessons learned because that's what they really care about. So let's walk through an example again. The biggest mistake I see people making with this question is rambling. We don't want to hear a novel one sentence for each of the S, T, A, R and L components of this story. So an example could be My coworker and I were working with a client on text they wanted into a brochure. There had been some miscommunication in the past and it seemed like there was some miscommunication again because the client was not happy with the draft result. I was tasked with communicating with the vendor, with the customer themselves, and getting the actual text. I noticed that there was miscommunication happening again, so I put a kibosh on that and I said let's have a face to face meeting. I really want to make sure that I understand the text you want to put in this brochure. The client was so grateful that I was willing to take time out of my day to understand the text they wanted. And we did notice that there was some miscommunication, but it was resolved in the end. Now discuss. Lesson learned. Your interviewers will love you for this. I learned that it's way better to over communicate than under communicate and I have taken that lesson with me in every project I have ever worked on since then. And then stop talking. Don't ramble. Remember, it makes you look nervous and it takes away from your credibility. So that was how to answer the three most common interview questions. I hope you learned something from this video. Thank you for watching. I will see you guys next time.
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