BUILD GREAT

ANSWERS:
SAMPLE RESPONSES
TO COMMON
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
Interview effectively by preparing
your interview responses based on
these sample answers
10 Interview 1. Tell me about yourself.
2. Why do you want this job?
Questions 3. What is your greatest weakness?
4. How do you show your customer orientation?
5. Tell me about a time you coached someone.
6. When did you face a challenge?
7. When did you think of a new way to do something?
8. Give me an example of a mistake.
9. When did you solve a problem?
10. When did you have to act quickly?
PART ONE:
3 COMMON
BASIC
QUESTIONS
AND SAMPLE ANSWERS
 FIRST BASIC QUESTION

TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF

Answer Breakdown
T HI S I S T HE F ORMUL A TO US E F OR
" T E L L ME ABOUT YOURS E L F " :
OVE RVI E W + E XPE RI E NCE + WHY HE RE

1. OVERVIEW 2. EXPERIENCE 3. WHY HERE

Summarize your Mention most Tell them you want
work experience in relevant examples of the job and why you
one main idea. 1-3 your experience from want it in a way that
sentences. your resume (not shows how you can
everything you've help them.
done).
QUESTION
SAMPLE ANSWER
"Tell me about yourself." I’ve been working in product for about a decade now. Most
of my experience has been in e-commerce and retail, but I
Don’t be surprised if the also have some SaaS experience. I’m passionate about
question isn't exactly in these creating long-term value for the customer, especially in the
words. Possible variations of EdTech space. During my last project, I developed an online
this question: "Walk me through classroom environment for a media company, which we
your resume" and "Introduce
then used to sell video learning experiences (mostly
yourself."
workshops) to enterprise customers. I know that your
company is developing similar online learning
products, and I’d like to work with you on them. I’m sure my
EdTech experience will be an asset here.
 SECOND BASIC QUESTION

WHY DO YOU WANT THIS JOB?

QUESTION SAMPLE ANSWER
"Why do you want this job?" What’s thrilling about the idea of working at this company is
that I wouldn’t just be using other people’s frameworks. I’d be
creating frameworks for others to use on my team. Creating
What to include in your
answer:
frameworks is something I’ve wanted to do professionally
1. Why you’re qualified since I began my career, but I’ve only been able to
2. Why the job excites you pursue that passion through open source projects. As you
3. Show you understand job know, I’m the largest contributor to an open source web
4. You want this exact job testing framework, which is used by some of
5. Relate job to your career
the largest enterprise companies, and you even use it here at
6. Say you plan to stay in job
*You can mention these
Amazon. That’s exciting, but I did that project on my own
points in any order. time, on the side, and the idea of working at a place where I
could contribute to and build frameworks from
scratch would help me use my talents in the best possible
way while also landing my dream job.
 THIRD BASIC QUESTION

WHAT IS YOUR WEAKNESS?

QUESTION
"What is your greatest weakness?"
SAMPLE IDEAS

I don’t know enough about finance to understand the

financial consequences of my plans - I’m learning on my
1. Don’t use a fake one - own and I also partner with the finance team on my plans
they will know My English - I’m taking classes to improve
2. Admit you have at least My writing (emails, etc.) - I’m taking classes to improve
one weakness I’m impatient with my direct reports - I’m working on this
3. Choose one that isn’t I’m bad at constructive criticism - I’m working on this
crucial for the job I don’t use data to back up my ideas - I always make sure
4. Show how you’re
to use data now when I plan
improving the weakness

.
PART TWO:
7 COMMON
BEHAVIORAL
QUESTIONS
AND SAMPLE ANSWERS
USE STORIES When your interviewer asks you a behavioral
question, use an example from one of your past

TO ANSWER jobs to answer it. Explain the example like you’re

telling a story. Put the story in the PAR structure –

BEHAVIORAL first explain the Problem (P), then talk about what
Action you took to solve it (A), then state the

QUESTIONS Results, (R). You can use the PAR method for each
story – it’s a repeatable structure to help you
remember your stories and tell them clearly.
 FIRST BEHAVIORAL QUESTION

HOW DO YOU SHOW YOUR

CUSTOMER ORIENTATION?
 SAMPLE ANSWER, GIVEN BY DIGITAL
QUESTION MARKETER
"How do you show your customer
orientation?" An example of how I work for my customers is from when I
had just become the Regional Manager at X bank in India in
2015. We were having problems retaining customers because
our online services, in particular the online banking app,
weren’t as sophisticated as our in person services were even
though more of our customers were wanting to bank online. I
realized this couldn’t continue and began a push to revamp
the app along with the IT department. It took us a year of
product development but in the end we rolled out the new
online banking app and service plan and it was well
received by our customers. This and effort from other
departments helped the organization notch customer
engagement of 75 from 55 percent earlier over the next two
years. We improved the region’s profitability by 15 percent.

.
 SECOND BEHAVIORAL QUESTION

TELL ME ABOUT A TIME YOU

COACHED SOMEONE.
QUESTION SAMPLE ANSWER, GIVEN BY AN
"Tell me about a time you coached ENGINEERING MANAGER 
someone." A senior manager complained about one of the developers
on my team regarding his tone being too harsh and frank in
his emails and over the phone. My manager brought it to my
attention, and I told her I would take care of it. I immediately
People often appreciate pulled this employee in for a one-on-one and brought this to
feedback and learn from it, but his attention. I told him it was not what he said but how he
most managers are hesitant to said it that makes all the difference. There are better ways to
give it. This person did a good provide feedback to other teams regarding their mistakes.
job giving feedback. He agreed that he reacted out of frustration and promised
me he would be more careful going forward. It has been a
year now, and he has completely turned it around. He has
been praised by other managers for his communication
skills, and he is now one of the rising stars on my team.
 THIRD BEHAVIORAL QUESTION

WHEN DID YOU FACE A

CHALLENGE?
QUESTION SAMPLE ANSWER, GIVEN BY AGILE COACH
"Tell me about a time when you faced Our company recently migrated from SDLC to Agile. It was a
a particularly challenging situation on difficult transition because my peers were used to waterfall.
I had already delivered a large project with Agile using Jira. I
a project. How did you overcome it?"
could see my manager was struggling with bringing
everyone on board so I learned Rally and set up my peers
with workspace in Rally. I also created a Rally guide for them
To overcome the challenge, the to set up their teams and use Agile ceremonies. We had a
Agile Coach took control of the large integration project this year where the team was still
situation by learning new tools and
waterfall whereas ours was Agile. This project was an ideal
methodologies, and then
candidate to form a vertical stack Agile team and collaborate
introduced those concepts to his
throughout the year to deliver. I was able to present a case
immediate team.
to senior management to form a cross-organizational Agile
team. Today we have a cross-functional and cross-org Agile
team that has a set cadence.
 FOURTH BEHAVIORAL QUESTION

GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE OF A
TIME YOU THOUGHT OF A
NEW WAY TO DO SOMETHING.
 SAMPLE ANSWER, GIVEN BY A DEVOPS
QUESTION ENGINEER 
"Give me an example of a time you My company wanted to speed up and have improved
thought of a new way to do monitoring for software deployments to our production
environment. The management team thought we should use
something."
a third-party tool, and we started to explore options. I
attended a number of demos, and we agreed on the best
third-party tool. I thought that the tool was good, but it was
This answer shows
costly, and I thought we should explore building the tooling
innovation and also
leadership. in-house for long-term cost savings even though this was not
what we normally did. I analyzed the level of effort it would
take us to build the same core functionality, and I included
maintenance cost over time. I compared that cost to the cost
of the third-party license, and added the additional cost we
would incur integrating these third-party tools into our
systems. Based on my analysis, we changed course, and
saved significant costs, especially over the long-term.
 FIFTH BEHAVIORAL QUESTION

GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE OF A
TIME YOU MADE A MISTAKE.
 SAMPLE ANSWER, GIVEN BY A CLOUD
QUESTION ARCHITECT
"Tell me about a time you made a When I worked at Microsoft, we had a client that needed our
mistake." support with a data warehousing initiative that had a strict
deadline. I was responsible for collecting the requirements.
This was my first database project.

You must say what you

learned from your mistake. Although I successfully id’d the data sources that are
required for the clients reporting needs and the nature of
the data structures, I made invalid assumptions about how
to convert data from one character set, encoding format,
metadata properties, or attribute mapping into another.

As a result, we missed the deadline. I learned that I needed

to be careful scoping out the work, asking for expert
judgement early, and to never make assumptions about the
data quality.
 SIXTH BEHAVIORAL QUESTION

WHEN DID YOU SOLVE A

PROBLEM?
 SAMPLE ANSWER, GIVEN BY A DATA
ARCHITECT
QUESTION Each year, Huawei works with its customers to perform
"When did you solve a problem?" disaster recovery drills. In this drill, we switch over all our
services from one data center to another in a controlled
way. A few months ago, while we were preparing for the
drill, we met an issue that could have blocked the whole
This is a long answer activity. A colleague was performing a regular check on
but it’s still good. hardware resources when we found that the number of
CPUs on a database machine disaster recovery site was not
matching the number of CPUs on the production site.

He requested a change window, brought the machine down,

changed the number of CPUs to match the production site,
but then the machine was not able to start up. After a few
calls with KVM experts at HQ, we understood that the HQ
experts couldn’t find the root cause and the solution
was to rebuild the disaster recovery machine.  cont'd
QUESTION SAMPLE ANSWER CONTINUED
To our surprise, we weren’t able to reuse resources allocated
"When did you solve a problem?"
to that dead virtual machine to a new virtual machine.
continued from previous page
Fortunately, we had another environment hosted in
VMware, and we had resources available to host a
new machine. I suggested that we host the failed disaster
recovery database in this new platform, which was
considered risky because none of the other disaster
recovery machines were running in VMware.

The customer was worried that hosting the failed machine in

the VMware environment would mean a machine on
production and the disaster recovery databases would be
hosted in a different hypervisor environment. Their
worry was understandable, since no customer/vendor would
host machines in such a way. cont'd
QUESTION
SAMPLE ANSWER CONTINUED
"When did you solve a problem?" However, I explained to them that Oracle is agnostic about
continued from previous page which hypervisor it is running on. As long as the OS version,
OS type, and DB version are the same, Oracle would work
without a problem.

Therefore, going against the normal way of doing things, I

rebuilt the 6.5TB database in a VMware environment in 20
hours. A day later we successfully performed disaster
recovery switchover and switchback operation.
 SEVENTH BEHAVIORAL QUESTION

WHEN DID YOU HAVE TO ACT

QUICKLY?
 SAMPLE ANSWER, GIVEN BY A
QUESTION
SOLUTIONS ARCHITECH
"When did you have to make a
One of the largest insurance providers in North America
decision quickly?" wanted to do a proof of concept for our UNIX bridging
solution. Before starting the POC, I reviewed the use cases
being implemented with the customer’s technical team. I
In this story, the Solutions
Architect could have told found out that one of their key use cases was not
the customer that the supported by our solution. To support it would require
product doesn’t support enhancing the existing product functionality. I reached out
the use case but instead he internally for an approval to engage the engineering team
solved the problem quickly. immediately and worked with the team in adding that
capability to the product. I didn’t want to wait. The
engineering team provided a patch in a short time, and I
was able to successfully deliver the POC addressing all the
use cases.
WHAT’S NEXT?
I hope this short guide has given you some tools to approach
your next interview with confidence.

If you're still concerned that you might not be able to effectively

convey all of your skills, experience, and passion in an
interview, don’t give up! My blog is full of concrete suggestions,
and I offer paid one-on-one sessions to help practice and
perfect your interview skills. Join the thousands of job seekers
who have gotten their dream jobs with my help.

Let me know if you have any questions, write to me at

[email protected]. JENNIFER SCUPI, FOUNDER

Your interview coach,

Jennifer