Five Tough Interview Questions— and How to Handle Them If you’ve been in many interviews (and by now, you probably have), you already know how awkward it can be to be asked a challenging question. Those are the queries that stop you in your tracks while your mind darts around frantically for some kind of answer. Sometimes the questions are genuinely difficult, but just as often, they’re only unexpected. In either case, the result is the same: a blank look, a blank mind, and an awkwardness that can be difficult to recover from. There are several solutions to the problem, although none of them will cover you completely. For example, you can check in advance with colleagues or online resources or even the interviewing organization to get a sense of what the questions might be. With that information, you could then go about preparing to answer those questions. But what if your information is wrong, or what if you still get stumped by outlier questions? Here’s a better idea: Create a process for yourself to help in real time if you encounter tough questions. Then you know you’ll be covered, whatever happens. Following is an example of a mental process to use, as well as five questions known to be difficult to answer. After you see the process applied to each
16
question, practice by applying “processed” answers of your own to the questions.
The Process STEP 1—Acknowledge the question, perhaps by saying “hmmm” or giving some other indication that you’re about to answer. STEP 2—Try to identify the “real” question. For example, when asked “Tell me about yourself,” the interviewer probably doesn’t anticipate hearing about your family of origin or early years in sports. Rather, he or she is expecting a brief synopsis of what you’ve studied and what your primary experiences in medicine have been, along with some of your goals. A more literal query might have been “Tell me about your medical career and your professional interests”—but that’s not how interviewers usually phrase things. STEP 3—When possible, match your answer with one of your strengths. For example, the answer to “Tell me about yourself” could start, “I’ve always been a very empathetic person, with a keen interest in the sciences; those strengths led me to the field of neurology... etc.”
