On your long journey through yourself, you have been successful in writing a good CV and called to the interview, but this is not the time to break the champagne! Do not just lay back and relax - continue preparing! You are still in competition with the other applicants who have also been called to the interview! You don't know the competition and you do not know if you are at the top of the pile or at the bottom. Your BEST attitude now is not to worry about the competition, because you cannot do anything about them. Focus on understanding what the interviewer wants to learn from the interview and what you have to offer!

You have written your CV as a pre-interview after very careful reflection and structuring. The point is that you may not know what exactly attracted the company's attention! Now it is a time to sit down and read over your own letter and CV again. Read through your application as a recruiter. What does he want to find out during the interview? And what is the link between the CV you have written and the interview questions he will ask?

1. First the interviewer will want to confirm his first impression about you. He will seek the proof to reinforce, strengthen and assure himself that the first impression was founded right. He will want to prove he was right about you, that you have a certain value.
2. Once reassured that he was right about your CV, he is going to probe for information that will provide a fuller, deeper picture of your skills and readiness for the job, and potential for your growth. The best strategy to adopt in this situation is honest dialogue, dialogue about your potential for learning and realism about a lack of experience.
3. The interviewer will seek some "contrary evidence", that is, evidence that challenges his first impression. He knows that nobody is perfect. The trained interviewer will probe the examples of your mistakes and will expect information about them. The "contrary evidence" will help him separate the true individual from the bluffer!

Do not play a role you cannot carry! Later you will be unhappy with the company if you do. At the interview, you will be nervous. Asking questions may help relax the atmosphere and create an attitude of mutual information seeking and providing. It is natural for you to ask questions about the company, the progress with the company, the challenges you will face and the opportunities you will have to progress with the company. If you do not know the answer to a question or have never faced a certain situation, admit it and try to learn about it! Go as a problem-solver, show your capabilities in solving some situations.

Interviewers often use them. These kinds of questions ask what you would do in certain situations. These maybe situations you have never faced before. Often such questions only measure the applicant's cleverness and encourage him to probe the interviewer and to guess what he wants to hear.
Questions might range from

"What would you do if you caught someone stealing from the company and you knew that he had financial problems?"

to

"How would you go about trying to change a policy that your boss supported but that you felt was detrimental to the department's operations?"

These kind of questions are often sprinkled throughout an interview, to check factual information, to compare your profile with job description or to refocus the interview on the concrete if it has been drifting. The best way to prepare for such questions is to have a mastery of your own background.

1. Importance of the past to predict the future

   
   This information will allow to recruiter to assess the person's skills for specific situations he or she is likely to encounter in the new job. The interviewer is building a case that proves that the applicant is what he or she claims to be. The past events that are scrutinized in such interviewing become evidence, positive or negative, of skills the applicant is offering.

2. Open-ended questions

   
   Open-ended questions are the most commonly used questions in behavioral interviewing techniques and are often launched by a closed-ended question. A typical example is:

   "Did you enjoy your last job?""

   This is typically followed by

   "Why?"

   The information given in the "Why?" part of the answer provides the richest information to the interviewer. Almost all open-ended questions aim at gathering information on the past behavior of the applicant, his or her performance and attitudes. The way person has dealt with instructions, responsibilities, information and people in specific situations provides great insight into what might be expected in the future from the same person.
   When confronted with highly targeting questioning about past experience, the thoughtful applicant will rarely fall silent and will always have an eventual reaction to the interviewer's questions, because he will have thought about the purposefulness of what he or she had done and will have developed a certain perspective. The unthoughtful applicant will be caught unaware and will stop dead in the interview, suddenly finding himself at a loss. To the interviewer, this will simply indicate a lack of analysis and commitment to the job.

3. Penetration technique

   
   The penetration technique is merely a variation of behavioral interviewing, used for probing a given area in greater depth. It uses layers of open-minded questions pushing the interviewee into more and more details, allowing to zoom in on the skills and personality traits he wants to discover. It typically might run like this:

   "What do you feel was the best contribution to the department in which you last worked?"

   "Why was it better that the other things you did?"

   "Did you have any difficulty getting in accepted?"

   "Why did you?"

   "How did you overcome those difficulties?"

   "What did you learn form the experience that might help you if you join our company?"

The case interview is often used by consulting firms. The interviewee is given a business case like those used in business schools and MBA programs. The case is not very long and the interviewee will be asked to react orally to the questions of the interviewer. Often the candidate will be asked to summarize the problems of the company in question, given an analysis and suggest solutions. He or she will be expected to defend the logic of the solutions propose.