Job interviews can be in three types, categorized by the structure of job interview questions. There are structured interviews, non-structured interviews and semi-structured interviews. Most common of them and most suitable type for the job interview is semi-structured type. The idea here is starting the interview with more general questions that will be offered to every candidate and later when the discussion develops interviewer may tend to ask unique questions about the candidate.

Job interview questions: In early parts of a job interview, it’s very common that the candidate is asked open questions where the candidate has to discover about themselves. The intent of the interviewer may be to envision the background of the candidate and get some understanding of his skill profile. This is where the participant is supposed to answer questions related to education and qualifications etc. The most popular example for this kind of question is Tell me about yourself . Although such questions are quite simple and may even sound silly at times, it is the best time offered for the candidate to position himself in to the process. In here, the interviewer is not just asking about details of the candidate but he’s measuring how entitled the candidate is for the particular job. So don’t ever rush through this phase and appear or sound like you are bored because you will never know what will come up next.

The final stage of job interview questions may tend to be unique for the candidate. Interviewer may ask questions about special points he picked up from the profile of the candidate and questions that need little intelligent from the candidate s side. It’s common in this stage that candidate may be asked questions he or she may not want to answer, such as questions about weaknesses, poor performance records etc. Most of them are hypothetical questions (What would you do if) where the candidate is forced to think in behavioral questions where candidate is asked to discover how he uses his experiences to tackle a given problem.

This is where the STAR approach comes in handy for any candidate. S fends for describing the Situation and setting the downplay of the problem he faced in the past. T is for The Task; here the candidate may draw the job he was assigned to. A fends for the Action, this may let in a description about actions that were taken and the skills used to resolve the problem. Finally R fends for Result, where candidate is expected to remark about the final outcome of his or hers work. For behavioral type of questions, the STAR method can be successfully employed to give powerful and muscular responses for questions for job interview.

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