Interview question types

Opening questions

The initial questions are normally relatively easy to answer and can help you settle into the interview. Alternatively, an employer may ask you to prepare a short presentation at the beginning of the interview. Use this as an opportunity to set a positive tone.

The simplest form of an opening question is "Tell me about yourself".

You may be also asked about

• your degree (and module choices)
• your projects or dissertation
• your work experience
• extracurricular activities

Be prepared to talk about yourself.

The aspects of yourself that you may be asked about can depend on the opportunity itself. For example, if you are interviewing for a technical role, you may be asked to summarise your research dissertation.

Where possible, highlight aspects of that experience that directly relate to the role itself.

Motivational and skills questions

Motivation questions check your knowledge of the job or course. They also help you to evidence your motivation, and show whether your understanding of the opportunity is realistic.

Questions could include:

• Why do you want the job or course?
• Why do you want to work for our organisation or research group?
• Tell us about a current news story in our industry. How do you think it will affect our organisation?
• What do you think we can learn from our competitors?

Effective research can help you to prepare for these types of questions.

For example, you might find out more about their projects, clients, values, working practices and personal development opportunities. By knowing more about them, you will have more to talk about, and will therefore be more effective in specifically evidencing your motivation and your understanding of the opportunity.

Competency-based questions

These questions are based on the competencies or qualities that an employer is seeking for a particular job, usually detailed in the job specification or advert. The interviewer looks for evidence of your relevant skills and so may ask you to describe examples of when you have, for instance, worked in teams, motivated others or dealt with a difficult situation.

Use the STARR technique to help you structure your answers:

• Situation
• Task
• Action
• Result
• Reflect

Do not try to rehearse your answers word-for-word. Instead, think of your key information and experiences and use the questions as opportunities to describe these, using the STARR structure as a guide.

Strength-based questions

Strength-based recruitment is growing in popularity amongst recruiters. This is due to increasing evidence that when someone is working to their strengths, they are more likely to have greater confidence, resilience, goal achievement, performance and engagement in their roles. This can have wider benefits to the employer due to having happier, more engaged and productive employees.

Strength-based questions aim to assess you against the strengths that are required in the role. Interviewers will seek to assess your personal attributes, identify your abilities and look for genuine pride in what you do.

They tend to ask questions relatively quickly in order to get a genuine response, which means you’ll probably be asked quite a few questions.

Questions could be quite broad, such as:

• What energises you?
• What activities come naturally to you?
• In your life, what have you done that you are most proud of?

Or specific or situational-based questions:

• During your weekly team meeting, you volunteer to take the lead on an exciting new project. After the meeting, a colleague approaches you and asks whether you would like to generate some ideas together. What do you do?
• You are working with two new colleagues on a critical project due to be completed in four days. Everyone has different ideas on how the project should run and there is some conflict. You haven’t made much progress on the first day. If this were you, how would you approach this situation and how would it make you feel?

Interviewers will take note of your body language and tone of voice, which provide cues to what you have enjoyed. For example, if someone is genuinely enthused by an experience they tend to become more animated, their tone of voice is upbeat and they will sit up straight, smile and look happy.

To identify your strengths, think about activities you did last week. What did you enjoy and made you feel energetic? Reflect on this, and write down the strengths that you used in those activities.

It could also be helpful to get an honest perspective of your strengths from those close to you, including friends and family members.

To prepare for a strengths-based interview

• create a list of your strengths through active self-reflection
• consider what evidence you can give for the strengths you claim to have. Think of examples of when you've used a strength
• research how your strengths fit with the organisational culture
• be enthusiastic and energetic when talking about a strength. This isn't easy to manufacture, so try to talk about genuine strengths
• understand your weaknesses and what you do not enjoy doing. This will demonstrate your growth areas

Hypothetical questions

These types of questions typically present you with a problem of some kind. For example, it may be a technical problem for a scientific role, a case study for a management consultancy role or a customer service scenario in a customer-facing role.

Take time to think through the problem and describe your thought process. Don't be afraid to ask questions or seek clarification.

Your approach to the problem and your analytical thinking are being assessed, and sometimes getting the right answer is less important than demonstrating your creativity, logical approach and enthusiasm for the challenge.

It may be helpful for you to structure your response as follows:

• Identify the situation.
• Analyse it.
• Generate possible solutions.
• Make a decision.
• Plan your action.

Key tasks

• Reflect on yourself, your experiences and the research you have undertaken on the opportunity. Where can you identify a match between yourself and the opportunity? How will you demonstrate your motivation? What examples will you use to demonstrate you meet their criteria?
• If you're doing a competency-based interview, try the Question Identifier Tool in Graduates First. Here, you can explore different example competency-based questions along with their corresponding response, which uses the STAR structure.
• Get more comfortable with the different types of questions you could be asked. Our mock interview videos include examples of a competency-based interview and a strength-based interview, as well as example interviews for postgraduate study and teacher training. View using a VR headset or any smart device.
• Don't forget you can ask questions too. For information about preparing interview questions for the panel, see our handy guide.