101 Smart Questions to Ask on Your Interview

[Pages:192]101 Smart Questions to Ask on Your Interview

S 101 mart Q A uestions to sk Y I on our nterview

4th Edition

By

Ron Fry

The Career Press, Inc. Wayne, NJ

Copyright ? 2016 Ron Fry

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fry, Ronald W., author. Title: 101 smart questions to ask on your interview / by Ron Fry. Other titles: One hundred and one smart questions to ask on your interview Description: 4th edition. | Wayne, NJ : Career Press, Inc., [2016] | Includes

bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015039059| ISBN 9781632650351 (alk. paper) | ISBN

9781632659637 (ebook : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Employment interviewing. Classification: LCC HF5549.5.I6 F757 2016 | DDC 650.14/4--dc23 LC record available at

|Contents |

Introduction ................................................................................. 7 How to Be a Great Prospect

Chapter 1..................................................................................... 19 The Strategy of Asking Smart Questions

Chapter 2..................................................................................... 39 Questions to Ask Yourself

Chapter 3..................................................................................... 65 Questions to Ask During Your Research

Chapter 4..................................................................................... 77 Questions to Ask "Pre-Interviewers"

Chapter 5................................................................................... 105 Questions to Ask Your New Boss

Chapter 6................................................................................... 137 Questions to Close the Sale

Chapter 7................................................................................... 149 Questions to Get the Best Deal

Epilogue.................................................................................... 169 Questions That Get Real

Appendix................................................................................... 171 All the Smart Questions to Ask

Index.......................................................................................... 189

nt roduc t ion

How to Be a Great Prospect

"Today's 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

I included the above quote in the last edition of this book, published in 2009. So how has the job market changed? Well, according to most economists, the Great Recession that destroyed millions of jobs ended that year, in June, to be precise. I doubt that the college graduates of the last seven years noticed--most of them still faced an unwelcome and unhealthy employment environment that featured hundreds of overqualified applicants for the most menial of jobs. And their older brethren fared little better, enduring unending rounds of layoffs and consolidations. For all except the one-percent elite, wages have been virtually stagnant for the entire new century.

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101 Smart Questions to Ask on Your Interview |

There has been one major development since the last edition of this book. According to the Wall Street Journal, hundreds of companies--including 457 of the Fortune 500--are using some form of "personality" testing that aims to correlate specific personality traits with success in a particular job. One test vendor, Infor, claims to assess more than one million candidates a month.

While tests such as Myers-Briggs and the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) were popular during the 1960s and '70s, we are clearly in a new age that Time magazine noted "is being driven by a collision of two hot trends: Big Data and analytics...The result is a mostly unchallenged belief that lots of data combined with lots of analytics can optimize pretty much anything...even people. Hence, people analytics." We are clearly headed to the Human Resources version of , with serious repercussions for future job candidates--what one pundit has called the "era of optimized hiring."

I will leave it to others to argue whether it is possible (or desirable) to accurately test for job-specific "success traits." Whatever you believe about this new trend, it is clearly another obstacle many of you will need to hurdle.

So let's get started

Most job candidates think of the interview in completely the wrong way--as an interrogation or police line-up. 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

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