Executive interviews often run between an hour and an hour and a half. Considering that the process involves this amount of time, it will be important that you are not answering questions most of the time. This can put you on the defensive and quickly turn into a stressful interview. Your answers to any question should never run more than a couple of minutes.

      Ideally, we would like our clients to be asking questions for 30 minutes of every interview. This enables them to assert some control over the pace and direction of these sessions. It also reduces interviewing pressure.

      Now, the way you ask questions and the specific nature of their content will tell a lot about you. For this reason, we want each of our clients to have a questioning strategy developed in advance.

      Most importantly, by asking intelligent and insightful questions, you will build your image in the eyes of the interviewer-and you will be building chemistry as well. You want him thinking, "Certainly, John seems very sharp, well informed ... impressive."

      You might consider these "offense questions" as opposed to "defense questions" when you are fielding the answers. Most executive job seekers never bother to carefully think about this aspect of interviewing. By not doing so, they make a big mistake.

      The questions we will develop for you will depend on the kind of position you are going after (usually we develop 10 or 15 questions which our clients use over and over through all of their interviews).

      The main point we need to keep in mind is that they need to be questions which, from the perspective of the interviewer, will get right to the heart of what is going on in the organization. The questions will need to be tailored to your situation, and we can develop and customize them with you.

© 2012 Robert J. Gerberg    All rights reserved