Here Is How to Answer These 5 Tricky HR Questions

During an interview, you’re not only asked questions according to your credibility and qualifications, but some questions aim to evaluate your intellectuality and personality. These questions could be indirect and bear no connection with the job. However, they do evaluate if you are a right fit for the organization. Such questions can be tricky to answer, especially if you’re attending a virtual interview, where your body language plays an important role in helping the hiring managers understand your eligibility.

A report by HR.com revealed that 62% of businesses with over a thousand employees conducted video interviews in 2018, and this number has subsequently increased in the later years. And you should note that about 29% of video interviews today are being held on some new and advanced platforms to analyze the candidates’ body language, voice and movements to get an idea about their stress or comfort levels.

Under such circumstances, it becomes all the more important to maintain poise and answer the tricky HR questions with full confidence. If you’re wondering what these questions can be, we have you covered. Scroll on to know about the 5 most common HR questions that may seem difficult to answer at once, and the amazing hacks to answer these and increase your employability.

What’s your biggest weakness?
You’re likely to hear this question at every interview you attend. The idea behind asking this question is to evaluate how self-aware you are and ready to work on your shortcomings. It also aims to understand your flexibility in terms of learning new things to improve yourself for the success of your team. If you’re aware of your weakness and you consider it as one, you’ll have more room for improvement, or so the hiring managers think. To answer this question, you should be transparent, as much as possible, and also a little critical of yourself. The mistake that many candidates commit is to project their strength as a weakness, which makes them sound a little overconfident. The key to answering this question effectively is to accept that you have flaws and to express them along with your plan to eliminate them.

Why did you leave your previous job?
This is yet another question that should be answered carefully to prevent red flags. Most of the time, you may feel the urge to share your grudges about the previous company or your former boss, but you should control it. It’s unwise to project your former company in a bad light, forcing the hiring managers to ponder if you’ll do the same for this company when you plan to move on. So, refrain from such arrogant revelations, even if you have a valid reason to do so. While there can be many reasons to leave the company, you should focus on the other, more practical reasons like lack of growth, your increasing expectations, and willingness to learn more. When answering this question, you should seem neutral about the role your previous organization played in your decision and focus on the other reasons that project you in a positive and confident light. Remember, no one likes a grumpy, tantrum-throwing employee who is ever-ready to badmouth the management at the slightest chance.

What’s your dream job?
While the question seems pretty easy to answer and blabber about, in fact, you should be utterly careful about what you say. Just keep in mind that this is not a casual chat but an interview that’s going to determine your career. If you express your wish to work at NASA as a dream job, you may lose the chance to work at the current company, as they will know that you won’t be committed to the position you’re applying for. So, tread carefully. Then again, answers like, ‘It’s my dream to work in a company that makes the most of my skills and abilities’, sound too artificial and mugged up. You can instead go for a practical answer like, ‘Although it’s my dream to work _____ (a big brand), just like everyone else, I will do good in any position that makes me feel the same kind of warmth and gives me similar chances to grow and build my career in the long run.’ Now, that’s what we call an honest reply!

Why do you want to join us?
Here, you’ll need more than just confidence and intelligence. You should be thorough with what the company does, its objectives, mission, and vision to carefully craft an impressive answer quickly. If you can align the facts with your idea of the organization, you’ll probably come up with the best answer. Learn all that there is to learn about their journey, their ways of doing business, and blend your interests and qualifications with the same to sound convincing, and not flattering. Answers like, ‘I like the way you have grown, and you inspire me’ is not the right way to do. These days, hiring managers like to take in intelligent and not boot-licking candidates.

Why don’t you tell us something about yourself?
This is where most candidates lose their grip and get too personal, which immediately raises a red flag. You should never, even for an instant, forget that you’re attending an interview, no matter what the medium is. Stick to your professional experience, your credibility, qualifications, achievements, and accomplishments that have brought you here, where you are now.

Wrapping it up
The hiring managers may ask you a whole lot of other tricky questions before you're shortlisted. The key to answering these questions is to be careful, think before you speak, be modest, confident, and never go overboard.

You should keep your mind in control and think about the implications of uttering something before you say it. And not to forget, you should be quick enough to answer the questions, or you may be tagged as not much confident or ineligible. Hence, be upfront, practical, and realistic while answering the HR questions and never eager to please but confident enough to impress.