Job interviews can be stressful. But this cheat sheet will provide you with easy answers to some of the most common questions to boost your chances of landing your dream job.
Q: What are your strengths?
A: I am great at time management. I can move fluidly between tasks, managing multiple projects and objectives at once. And, something that is quickly becoming one of my strengths, is putting the past behind me and not focusing on weird things that happened to me when I was nine years old.
Q: What are your weaknesses?
A: Caring too much. Sometimes I fixate on something until I’ve found the perfect resolution, even if that something happened when I was nine years old.
Q: Where do you see yourself in five years?
A: In five years I hope to be in a place where I can stop dwelling on the time when I was nine years old and I was sucked into the thick swamp ooze only to be rescued by some sort of creature of the night. I couldn't begin to describe for you what his face looked like, yet when I close my eyes all I can see is his featureless face. Piercing eyes, glowing red and staring at me with a mixture of pity and disdain as he carried me in his slime-covered arms, or tentacles, or extremities of some sort, I’m not sure. He set me next to the road that leads to my house. Then his red eyes drifted backwards, slowly retreating and disappearing beneath the swamp sludge.
Q: What can you bring to this company?
A: I can bring technical proficiency and excellent communication. I can also bring the unique perspective of a guy who kept going back to the swamp every Thursday for several years searching for the creature that saved me that night. I thought I found him once, but it was just my Uncle Kevin. He had taped laser pointers to his eyes in an attempt to perform LASIK on himself after watching a series of mail-order do-it-yourself eye surgery tutorial tapes.
Q: What type of work environment do you prefer?
A: What makes it even crazier is like two days after I got saved a different kid, Luke Fennel, drowned in that same swamp. He was on the swim team and was really bright. I don’t think he would’ve gotten sucked under. He knew that swamp. He was very careful. Strong swimmer. So what happened? Part of me wonders if the same creature that saved me killed him in an effort to keep some sort of balance or order within the swamp.
Q: Why are you leaving your current job?
A: I’m ready for new challenges as well as a group of people who haven’t grown tired of my “swamp story.”
Q: What do you like to do outside of work?
A: Everyone always says it was probably just Henry “The Swamp Creep” Reynolds, who got arrested a few years later, that grabbed me out of the muck but it wasn’t. Henry used to cover himself in mud. This thing dripped mud, yet it seemed to be… made out of mud. I don’t know how to describe the way the mud moved, but it was as if the mud was his flesh.
Q: How would you describe your communication style?
A: One time, I was driving home from the office after a long day and I looked in my rearview mirror and I saw the glowing red eyes that have burned themselves into my memory staring back at me. I slammed on the brakes and whipped around to look in the backseat, but it was empty. However, on the recently cleaned cloth backseat, there were mud stains that had not been there before. Can you explain that? Because I can’t.
Q: What motivates you?
A: The drive of knowing that perhaps we each only get one-second chance in our lives, and I was saved from the swamp when I was nine years old. I no longer have a safety net and I cannot afford to slip up or to waste my proficiency in Microsoft Office.