Essential Interviews Tips and Skills To Get You Started!
Essential Interviews Tips and Skills To Get You Started!
Home / Interviews Tips / Interrogation Questions
In the vernacular, the word “interrogation” has come to have something of a negative, even threatening, meaning. When we hear of someone being interrogated, typically what comes to mind is an image of accused criminals and witnesses being interrogated by police officers trying to make a case or attorneys trying to win a case. And surely some of us have left job interviews feeling that we, too, had been interrogated in just that way. But “interrogate” is used here in its more proper, Webster’s, sense, to mean: (1) “to question formally and systematically,” and (2) “to give or send out a signal for triggering an appropriate response.”
That’s not to say, however, that something of the colloquial meaning of “interrogation” is not implicit here. It is. These are tough questions, some because they are tricky, others because they force you to address issues you’d rather not. These are also difficult questions because their purpose is not always clear-cut; often, the interviewer, in asking them, is trying to narrow the field of appropriate candidates for the position you are hoping to win, and is testing, variously, your composure, your confidence, your ethics, and your resolve. To that end, some of the questions are similar or related to other questions in earlier chapters in the book, but generally they’re in more specific form. That’s one way interviewers have to backtrack, to ensure that you are consistent in your responses.
The range of questions that fall into the interrogation category is broad; hence the samples given in this chapter cannot be comprehensive. The objective is to help you prepare for the type of questions you can expect. Therefore, as you read them and consider how you might answer them (basing your answers, of course, on your professional field and your personal background), you should also be thinking of other similar and/or related questions that might come up and prepare answers to those as well.
