The most common job interview questions

The most commonly asked job interview questions and how to answer them

Peter Harris|

If your job interviewer has any skill, you will likely be asked some questions that are specific to the role that you’re applying for and the organization as a whole. The best way to prepare for these is to do your homework. You should walk into the interview with a good idea about what the main challenges for the company are and how your potential job can help contribute to overcoming them.

And then there are all of the other questions. What are your greatest weaknesses? Where do you see yourself in five years? Why should I hire you?

These questions can be tricky to answer off the top of your head, but because many of them are so common and regularly come up in interviews across industries, you can also prepare for these in advance.

Job interviews are how employers establish whether or not you will be a good fit with the team, so personality matters. For example, one of my favourite questions that I ask in interviews is, “What did you want to be when you grew up?”

I’m not looking for the candidate to name the exact job that I’m hiring for. (I mean, it would be great if that believably happened to be the case, but I get that most people change career ambitions numerous times throughout their life.) The answers I like to hear are the ones that tell the story of what the candidate was like as a child and how their education and experience have evolved them over the years to the career path that they are on now – one in which the job they are interviewing for is a logical next step.

Here is a handy infographic from that does a nice job of summarizing 35 of the most commonly asked questions in a job interview along with suggestions for how to answer them.

Frequently asked Job interview questions and their answers

Click on the image to open the full-sized infographic as a jpg.

- Peter Harris

- Peter Harris on Twitter

Category: Job interviews, Student,
  • Patrick Smith

    helpful, but the english in this is dreadful, to the point that some points are impossible to undertand.

  • Matt Walters

    This is an unmitigated horror show. Being disingenuous and insincere (“silly weaknesses that are strengths in disguise”) is as likely to cause any interviewer worth their salt to call you out on it, and to distrust any other (potentially sincere) answers you give later.

    Why work at a company where you need to pretend to be somebody else? Just be honest in an interview.

  • toc1276

    I find these tips very helpful. I do not understand why some have seen the language as dreadful and impossible to understand. I would say that the interview session is a marketing of oneself so one has to show the best of oneself in order to be able to market oneself. If u will start to show your weaknesses one by one by being sincere then everyone knows what will happen.

  • Kasey

    What does point 17 even say? That’s hardly english…

  • Stacey

    Thanks very much! Good info. I am taking the info as a guideline and not as presenting myself as someone else, or lying. It helps me to know what the employer is looking for.