Mastering Common Interview Questions & Responses Series #1: Why you and why this company / position?

We’re so excited to kick off this interview questions series with a couple of common interview questions. In the past as I was preparing for interviews, sometimes I was just looking for example responses so I knew how to think about my answer or confirm that I was on the right track. I realized that it was a little difficult to find this type of resource, that’s why am really excited about this interview questions series. Over the next year, we’ll be going through common interview questions and giving you tips and tricks on what or how to think about answering these questions.

The first set of interview questions we’ll tackle are:

  • What interests you about this position?
  • What interests you about this company?
  • Why should we hire you?

I lumped all these questions together because they’re related and can be answered in a similar fashion. This is usually an opportunity to:

  1. Showcase your experience and what you bring to the table (role fit)
  2. Showcase your passion in the company or role or industry (passion/interest)
  3. Showcase what you know about the company and what they do (company knowledge)

Let’s see an example. We’ll stay close to my world of tech. Let’s say am interviewing for a product marketing role, within the Platform and Interfaces group at Facebook- which is right in my alley. Here are a couple of ways I’d think about answering these questions.

What interests you about this company/position?

Three things interest me about this company.

  1. Advertising accounts for 97% of Facebook’s revenues which means this team has a huge impact on the customers and partners and revenue, which I’d love to be a part of. I also love that even with so much impact already, FB believes that they are only 1% done. It means that they are always hungry and always looking for opportunity to be better and make a difference – company knowledge
  2. I like FBs mission of making the world a smaller place and building communities, because I’ve seen what FB has done to my personal life. I get to interact and keep in touch with my grade school and high school friends in Kenya which otherwise would not have been that easy – passion
  3. Finally, the opportunity to bring my experience in tech, consulting, customer interaction, and digital to help Facebook in this journey of making the world a small place – role fit

Why should we hire you?

Three reasons why you should hire me are:

  1. I am very hardworking and would love the opportunity to bring my experience in tech, consulting, customer interaction, and digital to help FB in this journey – role fit
  2. Advertising accounts for 97% of Facebook’s revenues which means this team has a huge impact on the customers and partners and revenue, which I’d love to be a part of it. I know that I’ll be working on high impact projects which drive the bottom line – company knowledge
  3. Really passionate about technology and all the innovation happening in the industry and so am really excited to join a company and a product that touches 1.3B people daily and I’d love to be a part of that journey – passion

It’s important to know that interview questions can be answered in many different ways, which means there’s really not a right answer. Ultimately what the interviewers are usually looking for is passion for the role and company and the ability to articulate why YOU are the right person for their company.

As you start crafting your responses to these questions, be sure to give specific reasons and examples vs. general statements as that will ultimately be what distinguishes you from someone else. The responses should all address the ‘so what’ questions of why the information you are sharing with them is important and how it is relevant to the position that you are applying for.

Someone once told me to stick to the rule of 3, because right off the bat, your interviewer knows exactly what to expect from you. It also helps you organize your thoughts and responses especially as you prepare for interviews. As you start preparing for an interview, take some time to gather potential interview questions and go through getting responses to those questions. Don’t just do it in your head, literally take the time to write questions down and craft responses each one. As I was preparing for my interview at Google, you can read more about it here, I created this massive spreadsheet with questions I scraped from many different online resources. At the end of the day, I had over 100 interview questions to sift through and prepare an answer to because I didn’t know what to expect for my interview. The spreadsheet I created was such a useful tool to use, so we’re offering it to you here for free! We hope it can help you as much as it helped me.

Would love to hear from you about your experiences interviewing how you think about answering these types of interview questions. Chime in the comments. In the meantime, if you’d like some help crafting your resume or preparing for interviews, we’re offering a 30 minutes free consultation to get started. Contact us at https://advicemavens.com/ or [email protected]

2 thoughts on “Mastering Common Interview Questions & Responses Series #1: Why you and why this company / position?”

  • This is awesome information, I am currently looking for another job, I will definitely give this a try. Thanks advicemavens.

    • Thanks for reading Dinah .. let us know how we can help in your job search process 🙂

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