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Ask Liz Ryan: Handing multi-part interview questions?
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Hi Liz,
A few years ago I was severely injured, including sustaining a closed head injury. While people can't tell now by looking at me, some of the mental stuff can still be challenging....including very short term memory, and is exacerbated under pressure. I can analyze issues well but in an an interview if I'm asked 2 or 3 part questions, that can be tough, especially if there's a group of people interviewing me. Not sure about asking for a copy at the beginning of the interview to review as they're asking me the questions. What do you suggest?
Many thanks,
Alana
Dear Alana,
I am so sorry to hear about your injury. Those two- and three-part questions are challenging for anyone. We can't really ask for a list of interview questions at the beginning of the interview; we have to go with the flow. Here are a few suggestions:
- Repeating the question as soon as it's asked helps you frame the question in your mind. You can split a multi-part question into its component parts, and answer each one separately. You can take notes for yourself so that you don't lose track. That might go like this:
S/HE: So Alana, I'd like to hear about why you left Allied Chemical and went to Jones Electronics. Also, I've heard that Allied did a lot of work with Federal Parsnips - were you involved in that?
YOU: I'll start with the Allied-to-Jones move. (looking down at your notepad and making a quick note for yourself.) Then, I'll tell you all about the Federal Parsnips deal. When I'd been at Allied for three years, I learned through a technical writers' group that Jones was beginning a project in..... [and so on]
- Another technique is to look for the point of the question -- the question behind the question, in other words. Very often, a multi-part question points back to one central issue (with luck, a pain point) the interviewer is curious about. If you speak to that issue, you don't have to answer every sub-question in the list. Here's an example of that:
S/HE: We have a huge amount of copywriting to do around here almost every week. We have website copy to write, copy for marketing materials, customized Powerpoints for the sales force and responses to RFPs. So there's a lot of writing, and a lot of version control and keeping track of pricing and feature changes. I'd like to hear about the writing you did at General Vegetable, and if you could tell me about your copy-editing skills, that would be great. One other thing -- have you used Framemaker?
YOU: I think I'm tracking with you -- you've got a huge volume of writing here, and version control is essential, as is accuracy. I ran the marketing library for Consolidated Products, where I wrote or edited anywhere from sixty to 100 marketing pieces per month, purged obsolete materials and coded and filed new ones. In that job, I launched a weekly mini-newsletter that kept our sales and marketing people up to speed on the language we used to describe our services, and people told me that they used that information even in their casual day-to-day interactions with customers.
We used a system called ThoughtSifter there, although I've worked with Framemaker more recently. I'm a fanatic for accuracy, not only on marketing docs but in packaging, sales-training materials and even customer-support protocols -- and I'm just as happy copyediting as I am writing. Can you tell me more about the content-creation process? I'd be very interested in that.
In this example, the interviewee (you!) only answered one of the three parts of the three-part question, but she got across the message that she sees what the employer is up against and has slain the same dragon before.
Best of luck!
Liz
Liz Ryan's virtual job-search workshops cover everything from writing a Human-Voiced Resume to negotiating salary and using LinkedIn. Liz also offers one-on-one career coaching and a free and friendly online community with 25,000 members. Liz is a national workplace expert and a former Fortune 500 HR VP with 50 million readers in the U.S. and abroad. Reach Liz here.
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