This article – 4 unique questions to ask an employer at a job interview and why – brings you a different viewpoint on what to ask the employer at the job interview. There are many articles about the topic. However, most of the questions seem to be asked to please the future employer instead to get information you need.
Immerse in the article and break an endless circle of ridiculous questions and answers. HR officers seek what to ask candidates on the Google and you do the same. Does it make sense? I don’t think so. Neither side actually knows why they ask.
The article gives you 4 questions. There is written why you should ask them, what a good answer is and what bad answers are. You also find out what goes on behind the closed doors and why companies take their time to answer you. How interview tasks can be used so that you benefit from them.
What to beware at job interviews. Toxic statements of HR officers and directors and when a red warning banner should pop up in your head. How to inspect (scrutinize) the future employer by getting information from previous employees and from the Internet.
The article includes a set of motivation letters as an attachment to use.
Note: The text is based on my personal experience which numbers more than 1000 sent CVs and over 100 job interviews. The experience relates to the Czech republic and the Great Britain. The job interviews are mostly for white collar jobs. The minority was for blue collar jobs. The article is inspired by related discussions on LinkedIn.
Why to ask
When you decide about buying a new electrical appliance, you want to know the most about it before you buy it. You do it because you’d like to gain trust in it. You ask and then arrange an agreement between you and a salesman. You do this thought process based on information you gained and a price.
It’s very similar to jobs. It is a relationship, where both sides must strike a balance. The relationship must be beneficial for both. When the both parties don’t find a common ground, there isn’t any agreement. You ask questions at job interviews to create an idea about the job and an unwritten agreement. which outlines what will follow after you’ve accepted the job.
The first reason why to ask is to create a transparent contract of the common relationship.
What if you don’t have the notion about what you expect from the job? In this case it’s advisable to write down your expectations before the interview. You can consider the expectations to be requirements for the job. They are the same requirements as those which companies put in job adverts.
This is very important. If you don’t have the notion, it is easy for others to persuade you that their notion is your notion.
You will cooperate with your future colleagues, ask them, carry out their tasks or assign tasks to them. Why not to try it right at the interview? It is possible to find out these aspects by common interaction at the interview. You find out if such communication style suits you and if you like tasks to be given to you that way. You also try to assign a task to them. It’s possible to test all of these aspects.
You achieve it with: asking questions about the job, cooperation on mutual expectations, how much and if they can back up on their requirements. And how to assign a task to them?
- Ask them for a feedback on the task they gave you.
- If you don’t like their requirements, ask them to discuss it with their superiors.
You will spend 1/3 of your life at work. People choose their life partner from months to years. Why to deprive yourself of such an opportunity to choose the right job? You don’t make love with the first person you meet or gets acquainted on the street (Unless you’re drunk.)
Number one: How do you train new people at this job?
Why to ask it
The main reason why to ask the question one is to find out if they have an established procedure for training new employees. The second thing is if they train you at all. The training is an investment in an employee. You find out if the company is willing to invest (humanistic approach) in you, or if they just want to exploit you and don’t want to give anything in return.
Good answer
If they have training materials in a computer for you and if you have colleagues at your disposal, that’s the best. Ideally they should be a colleague, a mentor, allocated for you, who trains you and helps you to integrate in the team.
The second good answer is that there will be one colleague allocated to you and they tell you how they trained a previous colleague. Or the former colleague is still at the company and they will hand over the agenda to you.
Another answer can be that they have an information system where all needed information is stored. I consider this answer the least suitable. Working time of the current employees isn’t being invested. When you cooperate with current employees, you also create personal bonds with them.
Bad answers
They can’t answer the question. They have said nothing about someone else taking care of you. Everything is up to you. They expect a lot, but don’t want to invest time of their employees in you. The second option is they babble something, you write it down. When you read it at home, you realize that what they said sounds like a random word generator, a politician, longing for votes of people. You may even get a doughnut (company promotional items).
Number two: What are your expectations after 3 months?
Why to ask it
Adverts offering jobs are too general quite often. There are requirements which don’t correspond with the jobs offered at all. That’s the reason why to ask it.
The answer informs you about the content of a job and about what an employer expects from you to know and accomplish after the given time period. Generally people know what they want to. It shouldn’t be a problem to answer the question.
You have experience and are aware of what you can achieve or can’t achieve in 3 months. When the employer answers you, you have an opportunity to consider if you are capable of fulfilling their expectations or not. The question also answers indirectly on how much time you spend on self-study and fitting in the team.
Moreover, it shows your interest in the job position.
Good answer
The good answer is the one which put requirements on you. Simultaneously it shouldn’t be anything too difficult for you. The employer tells you in detail what you will do in the first 3 months and they already have a notion in their mind about it.
An example is: You apply for a Junior Front-end developer / webmaster with the knowledge of HTML and CSS. If you command HTML and CSS at 70 % and their goal is that you will understand their websites and be able to code basic stuff, that’s the optimal requirement.
Bad answers
The wrong answer are excessive demands. An example is: Junior Project manager. You’re a novice and they want you to manage project over 50 000 € (The average salary per month in the Czech republic is 1 540 €.) In addition they would like you to be knowledgeable about the technical side of the thing.
No demands, expectations and no notion are also a wrong answer. The problem is that non-existing expectations can’t be fulfilled. Moreover, the expectations can be changed by employers anytime. An example of a bad answer can be found out from notes written down at the interview. The notes when read at home sounds like political babbling and padding.
Number three: What are your expectations after 1 year?
Why to ask it
The question extends the previous question and has the same targets. Simultaneously it serves as a method of cross-checking of the truthfulness of the previous answer. The answer on this one should logically follow the answer on the previous question.
Moreover, you show that you would like to stay at the job longer than one year.
Good answer
The good answer should consist of more complex requirements which you can’t fulfil now but you will be able to do it in one-year time.
An example is the job position of the Junior Front-end developer. The employer wants you to be able to code the whole website on your own and deploy on the server. That can be considered as a reasonable answer.
Bad answers
I can’t say there is a truly wrong answer. It is possible that the employer won’t have a clear answer as they miss a notion about what will be in one-year time (It relates to newly established jobs.) Requirements which don’t logically follow the previous answers can be an example of a wrong answer.
Number four: How do you evaluate an employee’s work?
Why to ask it
It is good to ask in order to find out based on what you will be rewarded or “punished”. It also indirectly communicates to you how much your work will be checked and how. It is possible to find out if a boss assess you based on results of your work (It’s good) or if they want to check every step you do and micromanage you (That’s bad).
Good answer
The good answer is that you will be assessed based on results of your work. It is also fine if the boss checks you more often even during working on the assigned tasks at the beginning. It will help you to avoid mistakes.
Bad answers
The bad omen is that you will be checked at every step of your work and you’ll be micromanaged all the time.
The bad thing is when the employer don’t assess your or don’t know how. It tells you that there are no requirements for employees. As a consequence you colleagues will be lazy and they won’t have a need to fulfil anything. As a passionate and enthusiastic person you won’t get on with them.
Peculiar things happening behind the closed doors
Company doesn’t look for anybody
You write a cover letter and a CV. You send it. Nobody answers you or they answer you: “Get in touch with us in one month.” You write it down in the calendar. You call them in one month. Surprisingly the situation has changed in a way that the job tasks were given to their currents employees instead of hiring a new one. One month later you check their website and the job advert is still there. They keep looking but in fact they don’t look for anybody.
Company is in the middle of the job creation
You attend an interview. You fulfil most of their requirements or all of them, but they don’t accept you and give you a vague response: “We’ve hired a different person.” The job advert is still at their website, the content of it changes during following six months. Though, they’ve already hired someone.
This is a case when the company doesn’t know what they want to. They are just in the middle of creating the job position. You were used as a test subject. Sometime in the future you may get paid for your services. In the similar way as people are paid by cosmetics companies to try their ointments under development.
They answer question with question
It can happen that employers will be answering the questions with a question. They will claim they don’t understand the questions. Though, you know the question are absolutely clear as you have asked them multiple times.
You can come across this attitude with experienced managers or businessmen. It’s not that they don’t understand them. They try to find out what you want to hear from them. The answer which you give them serves as a guide to adjust their answers in order to please you. That way their answers will meet you expectations. That’s what you don’t want to. You want to know the truth and the reality in the company.
Your new job is your new God
„Where do you see yourself in five years?“
This question makes me swoon. I would rather be hit by a high-speed train on a railway where trains go on a maximum speed than to hear the question again.
I conducted a social experiment on employers. I created two answers on the question. The first one is an optimal one showing that I am reasonably ambitious. Not too much to endanger their positions and that I see myself working for them in the future.
The second answer, the truthful one, is that I don’t know what will be in five-year time. I don’t know if they are a good employer. I don’t know how it works inside. Sometimes they don’t even know if they exist in 5 years.
I took the answers in turn at interviews. I came to a conclusion that employers expect you that your new job becomes your new God. Different answer is not allowed. It even happened to me that after I had answered the truth, the interview was terminated during its course.
Why do employers want to hear a fabricated answer? I think it’s better to hear the truth.
What to gain from interviews if not a job
You keep going to interviews, work on interview assignments but you have not succeeded in getting a job. It is an investment of your time in something without an outcome. How to make use of it?
The first option is to use it to train skills on the assigned tasks. These tasks may be programming code, marketing exercise and so on. When you send the tasks to the future employer, you receive a feedback. However, you must ask for it.
Some companies give you a useful feedback which you can use to improve. Part of the companies give you a totally useless and vague one.
You can acquire lots of informations which you wouldn’t get your hands on if you didn’t attend them. You can use them to build your own business or just to enrich your information base.
Examples of interesting pieces of information:
- Number of candidates applying for jobs,
- Which software a company uses and why,
- Which marketing techniques and strategies they use,
- How a company goes about contracts.
The pearl of wisdom which reigns all the info I’ve ever got is:
“People come to believe to whatever you tell and foist on them.”
Further interesting finding was that a myriad of candidates apply for marketing positions. I assumed it but a company from Brno confirmed it. They received 80 CV for a job of a marketing assistant.
On the other hand, there are jobs where you’re the only one candidate. Such jobs may not make any sense and the company really wants you. Be aware of such ones.
What to beware when it comes to types of contracts
This part about contracts used to the Czech republic. There are many types of a contract in existence. There is a standard employment contract. It is possible to have the contract for a full-time as well as a part-time job. If you have this one, all employee benefits and legal employee protection are included in it. There are among them: paid holiday, paid social security and health insurance, redundancy payment, entitlement to a paid sick leave and a two-month notice period. The contract is kind of a commitment towards you.
Part-time, dpč, invoicing
If you’d like to work from 0,2 to 0,8 of a full-time job, employers may offer you: “dohoda o pracovní činnosti,” or invoicing on IČO (company registration number).
Dohoda o pracovní činnosti (Special short-term job contract)
This type of a contracts obliges an employer to pay the social security and health insurance for you. However, you’re not entitled to paid holiday and you can be dismissed with a 15-day notice period.
Invoicing and IČO
Many Czech companies offer full-time jobs and want to reward you via invoices on IČO. It means they want you to be their employee and they don’t want to take over responsibility over you. You act as entrepreneur towards them (Because you don’t have a proper employee contract with all the legal protection.)
The disadvantage of invoicing is that if the employer won’t have tasks for you to do, they don’t give you any money and you’ll get into a complicated situation. You are entitled neither to employee benefits nor the legal protection. It’s easier for the employer this way as they have less responsibility over you and you have less securities.
The employer employs you in order to earn profit from you so that their company runs. That’s the reason why they must take over responsibility.
I don’t recommend this type of rewarding. It’s called false self-employment. It is used to circumvent social welfare and employment legislation. Another term for it is a gig worker.
If you have decided for invoicing I recommend to have the offered reward raised of an amount equal to the social security and the health insurance payments and other stuff. However, in that case the employer would rather employ you than invoice you I guess.
Toxic phrases and oddities at interviews
You can come across various toxic phrases and weird situations at interviews. They should raise an alarm in your head. There is a short list of them:
- “Do you rent a flat or do you have a mortgage?”
- There are two things which the employer wants to you. Either they want to know if you stay with them for a long time or that they want to know how much you will be dependent on them so that they can control you.
- “Do you smoke? We don’t employ smokers.”
- The first thing which crossed my mind when I heard the sentence was that the employer is concerned about my health and wants to have a uniform team. Then I found out that they are only interested in how much paid time you spend by not working.
- “The rest of the people in the company are not good enough to do specific tasks. That’s the reason why I have to do it.”
- The sentence says that the boss has a problem to delegate tasks to their subordinates. There will be a lot of micromanagement at the company. The boss doesn’t trust his people and wants to do everything on their own.
- Any kind of a judging statement without a proper explanation why
- During an interview you can come across a sentence: “You don’t know how to sell.” If the sentence isn’t follow by how to improve it, it is manipulation with you.
- The boss claims that they are the boss. You can see that someone else is a decision maker at the interview.
- During the interview you feel that the boss is only by their title, but someone else decides. It can lead to a situation that the conditions which you agree with the boss won’t be valid after signing a contract.
- It’s more important for the selection committee what you know about the corporation what your real practical knowledge of the subject.
- You are accepted based what you know about the corporation. You deliver it as poetry at the interview. Your work-related experience and knowledge aren’t important. When you’re accepted at such a job, the content of the job will be more about attending meetings and saying what the bosses want to hear than honest work. This is typical of big corporations.
- Space arrangement is hierarchical at the interview.
- There is a lot of space between you and the selection committee. It’s you versus them. The main person (for example a faculty dean) is lined with people on both sides as his minions in order to give him/her the sense of importance. Only one person rules in such organization and only one opinion is allowed. It’s necessary to be a brown-nose to survive.
- The company calls you out of the blue. They want the interview right now and you didn’t have a chance to prepare.
- I cannot explain what will happen after signing a contract but I can say it is uncomfortable.
Thorough employer survey
Sometimes prospective employers call to your previous employers to check references. This is always done in the Great Britain.
Do your own survey on prospective employers. One option is to check reviews on atmoskop.cz, vimvic.cz, cz.indeed.com or glassdoor.com. Current and former employees add reviews of their employers there.
It is necessary to take into consideration that they are only opinions of people not facts. If there is a lower number of rankings, it may not have a relevant value. The second problem is that even owners of companies add reviews to their own companies.
The second option is LinkedIn where you can look for former employees and send them a message to ask around. This method guarantees quite interesting information. It is possible to make a picture at least from 5 of such messages.
Take into consideration that some people who you approach may have a vested interest with the former employer (They have a company in the same industry.) They can also be family members of company owners. These circumstances influence what they share with you. It’s very easy to find out about it as people are more open in 1-to-1 conversations.
These methods of the thorough survey will help you to create a notion about how it really work at the prospective employer. However, they are just hints not authoritative facts. The most important is how you feel at the interview, how the employer behaves and answers your questions and what conclusion you come to from notes written down at the interview.
Conclusion
You have found out about what to ask at interviews to get a better picture and arrange an unwritten agreement between you and your prospective employer. The article has shown you how to choose the right company and how to check it properly. This will make your experience at work less stressful at the future.
There are also dangerous situations and phrases which you can hear at the interview and their hidden meanings.
What’s your experience? Join the discussion under the article.
