Job Search Books + Guides

* You really don't have as much experience as we would like -- why should we hire you?

* How many hours in your previous jobs did you have to work each week to get everything done?

* What do you consider most valuable -- a high salary, job recognition, or advancement?

The book also arms readers with questions to ask prospective employers that could prevent their making a big job mistake:

* What would you say are the worst parts of this job?

* What are the major problems facing the company and this department?

* Why aren't you promoting from within?

Taking readers through the entire process, from the initial interview to evaluating a job offer, and even into salary negotiation, Acing the Interview is a no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners guide to interview success.

People interviewing for jobs today often fail because they are using yesterday's strategies. They haven't realized that the best employers have changed the way interviews are done, and it now takes a different strategy to succeed. Competency-Based Interviews shows today's candidates a new, more targeted way to prepare for the tough interviews based on the competencies that the most sophisticated employers are looking for.

Competency-Based Interviews offers you a new and more effective way to handle the tough new interviews so that you will emphasize the knowledge, skills and abilities that you have and that employers need. Most sophisticated U.S. and international employers are using competency-based systems to recruit, interview and select employees. Corporations such as American Express, Anheuser Busch, BP, Coca-Cola, Energizer, Federal Express, IBM, and Pfizer are all looking for specific competencies.

Preparing for a competency-based interview will give you the strategy you need to:

• Be selected for the most competitive positions.
• Win the best job at a new organization.
• Get a great first job or internship.
• Be chosen for that critical promotion in your current organization.
• Take control of your career path.
• Increase your salary.
• Get more interesting assignments and more interesting work

Most interviewees don't know how to be successful when they are being interviewed by an organization looking for key competencies. Few candidates answer questions so they demonstrate their own critical competencies. Competency-Based Interviews will teach you what you need to master this tough new interview style and give the interviewers the answers that will win you the job.

If the interactions between job seekers and job interviewers can resemble a cat-and-mouse game, with each group trying to outwit and to stay one step ahead of the other, High-Impact Interview Questions serves as recruiters' foil to the books popular with candidates, such as How Would You Move Mt. Fuji? and Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions . It opens by describing three different kinds of questions which dominate most modern job interviews: conventional questions ("What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?"), situational questions ("How would you handle a crisis in which your boss asked you to do something that you considered unethical?"), and brainteaser questions ("Why are manhole covers round?"), and analyzes the shortcomings of each approach. These techniques for sorting good job candidates from bad are fundamentally flawed, according to Hoevemeyer, because they are far too predictable and artificial, and don't illuminate the qualities that actually make a difference to new employees' success.

Instead, Hoevemeyer advances a philosophy which she terms "Competency-Based Behavioral Interviewing" (CBBI). Her basic premise is that past performance is the best predictor of future performance, and that the more recent a particular behavior, the stronger of a predictor it will be. If you accept those assumptions, then much of what follows in the book's explanations of CBBI are highly logical.

The most valuable part of High-Impact Interview Questions is its extensive catalog of sample interview questions, grouped according to the underlying quality which they're meant to uncover. After introducing CBBI and showing how it ties specific and precise interview questions back to the functional competencies job seekers will need in a particular position, the book provides a very handy guide to sample questions which any interviewer can use. Interested in a candidate's decision-making ability? Try "Describe a time you had to make a quick decision with incomplete information?" How about attention to detail? For that, the book prescribes queries like, "Tell me about a time when you caught an error that others had missed."

Esoteric philosophical tome, this isn't. But for those job interviewers who believe in competency-based questions and want an efficient guide to learning about interviewees' true potential, this book is a worthwhile read. --Peter Han

Book Description:

"""Tell me about a time...."" The words evoke a child's fairy-tale innocence. Yet when used by an interviewer, they can help to determine the suitability of a job candidate by eliciting real-world examples of behaviors and experience that can save you and your organization from making a bad hiring decision.

High-Impact Interview Questions shows you how to use competency-based behavioral interviewing methods that will uncover truly relevant and useful information. By having applicants describe specific situations from their own experience during previous jobs (rather than asking them hypothetical questions about ""what would you do if...""), you'll be able to identify specific strengths and weaknesses that will tell you if you've found the right person for the job. But developing such behavior-based questions can be time-consuming and difficult.

High-Impact Interview Questions saves you both time and effort. The book contains 701 questions you'll be able to use or adapt for your own needs, matched to 62 in-demand skills such as customer focus, motivation, initiative, adaptability, teamwork, and more. It allows you to move immediately to the particular skills you want to measure, and quickly find just the right tough but necessary questions to ask during an interview.

Asking behavior-based questions is by far the best way to discover crucial details about job candidates. High-Impact Interview Questions gives you the tools and guidance you need to gather this important information before you hire."