Successfully navigating a job interview is rarely easy. You’re expected to give informative and honest answers on the spot while simultaneously proving you’re a likeable person who is a good cultural fit for the company. By the time you get to the end, you just want to get the hell out of there and wait hopefully by the phone. Instead, try wrapping up the interview with some intelligent questions of your own — you’d be surprised how much this can help your chances.
There’s no shortage of tips and guides relating to job interviews on our website. However, most of them focus on how to answer common interview questions. What is often overlooked is the importance of asking questions yourself.
Most job interviews typically end with the prospective employer asking the candidate whether they have any questions of their own that they would like to ask. This is more than just a nicety — they genuinely want to know.
More often than not, the interviewee will politely answer in the negative which is a mistake. Having no questions at all suggests that you’re not actually that interested in the business or how it’s run. By contrast, having a few intelligent questions up your sleeve can help you stand out from the other candidates.
Naturally, the type of questions you ask will depend on the type of job you’re going for. It could be a query about BYOD policies, the size of the team you’ll be working with or just a general question about the culture of the workplace.
It’s very rare that you’ll go into an interview knowing absolutely everything about the company, so coming up with a few questions shouldn’t be too hard. As an added bonus, you’ll be finding out more about your prospective workplace — depending on the answers, you might even decide you don’t want to work there anymore.
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