Page 60 - John Kador - 201 Best Questions to Ask on Your Interview-McGraw-Hill (2002)

CHAPTER 3

WHEN TO QUESTION

NO NEED TO WAIT FOR

AN INVITATION

While the common pattern is to have the interviewer invite the job
seeker to ask questions, you are sometimes better off taking the initia-
tive. Here are three scenarios in which asking questions (after you ask
permission to ask them) gives you better control of the job interview.

IN THE BEGINNING
Janice Brookshier, a Seattle-based recruiting contractor and president of
Seattlejobs.org, has an informal interviewing style. In her dialogue with
the candidate, she makes it quite clear that the candidate is free to ask
questions at any point in the conversation. Brookshier notes, “Candi-
dates are always free to ask a question, whether solicited or not.”
If Brookshier doesn’t get intelligent questions during the first part
of the interview, she starts to wonder. But her worst suspicions are con-
firmed if the candidate doesn’t have any questions even after she in-
vites some. “I see it as a test,” she says. “If you have no questions for me,
it tells me that you are either way too passive or just not very serious. Ei-
ther way, I lose interest real quickly.”
What impresses Brookshier the most are questions that transform a
question that she had asked the candidate earlier in the interview. For ex-
ample, if she had asked the candidate:

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