750: Own Your Job Interview in 2026: How to Answer the 5 Most Common Interview Questions Using Human Psychology

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: Two identical candidates walk into the same interview with the same resume. One gets the job, the other doesn't. It's not about how well they've prepped. It's not about what they know. It's about how well they leverage human psychology. What do I mean by that? Well, it turns out studies show that we tend to hire people that we like and that we're familiar with.

[00:00:21] It's human bias in action. But this episode is about how to be more of who you are in an interview by addressing five specific types of common interview questions and how to leverage that human psychology that allows you to get roles created or even modified for you. By the way, yes, we've actually done that with many of our clients.

[00:00:39] You can hear that on many other stories of the Happen To Your Career podcast. But we're even gonna go a step further. We're gonna talk about how all of these interviews differ if you're in your 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond.

[00:00:50] Introduction: This is Happen to Your Career. Most people let their career happen to them, falling into jobs by accident, staying longer than they should, and wondering if this is really all there is. But a few people decide to stop settling and do something different. This podcast is for you to take control, get intentional, and design your career to fit the life that you want to build. Real stories and real research so you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow.

[00:01:16] Scott Anthony Barlow: If you're in the middle of a career change right now or about to interview, and especially if you're in your 40s, 50s, or even your 60s, then I'll just acknowledge that interviews tend to feel a bit different this time around.

[00:01:28] And this is especially true if you're transitioning out of an organization or industry where you've spent the last couple of decades in. Most people think that they need to prepare responses as it relates to interview questions, and we're actually gonna go very much the opposite direction today. We're gonna break down the five types of questions that tend to trip most people up.

[00:01:52] They're some of the most common types of questions, too. We're also going to share some of the wrong answers that people give without even realizing it, and more importantly, what to do instead. And then I want you to hang tight, because at the end we're gonna address if you fall into the 40 to 60 crowd, what is specifically different about those types of interviews if you've had a lot of experience or you're in senior-level positions or executive roles?

[00:02:15] The first type of question is one that almost everybody thinks that they've got nailed, and they feel like there's an obvious answer here. Turns out there is not. It is, however, single-handedly the most common variation of question that comes up in interviews. That question, in some form or another, is, "Tell me about yourself."

[00:02:34] Okay, the irony here is it's not even actually a question. It's a statement. But it does get asked or said in almost every interview you walk into. Sometimes it sounds like, "Take me through your resume," and, "Give me an overview of your background. Tell me about yourself." It shows up in one way or another across the board.

[00:02:52] Here's the thing, though. Most people don't necessarily do the work to figure out what's relevant to the person who's sitting across from them, so they overshare. They start with things like, "Well, I was born in Bonners Ferry, Idaho," and then just keep going chronologically through there. Am I being a little extreme?

[00:03:10] Yes, but that happens on the regular. I've been involved in literally thousands of interviews, and I've seen it over and over again at every single level. Turns out nobody cares where you were born. Going back to your childhood tells the interviewer nothing about whether or not you're going to be the most effective person for this job, unless, of course, you've done the research and the hiring manager happens to be from Idaho too, and then you're making that connection on purpose.

[00:03:35] The fix here is relevancy, and the simplest way to build that type of answer is a framework that I didn't make up, but I love. It's called past, present, and future. It sounds like in the past, here's what I did, and in the present, here's what I'm doing now, and in the future, here's what I want to be spending my time on. Think about it that way.

[00:03:58] The challenge here is making sure that it is the relevant pieces. Let me give you an example of how this works. In the past, I worked in various different roles of HR, and the one thing that kept happening over and over again was I would walk into a role, and I would turn around and increase the retention by about ten percent or more.

[00:04:19] And I found that I loved that work. And so what I do now is I've shifted more of my time and energy into talent development and also into change management. And as I've done that, I've realized I particularly love the change management portion, and that's why I'm really interested in this role, is I'd like to spend seventy-five percent of my time in the areas of change management.

[00:04:44] Okay, so if I'm interviewing for a change management role, then this becomes super relevant. What I've done is I've literally built a bridge from where my experience is in the past all the way to why I'm interested in what I'm interested in. And then with a really quick couple of examples along the way, I've shown how I'm delivering results too.

[00:05:06] Okay, so this can be expanded or shrunk down as much as it needs to. But the key here is going to be, is it relevant? Is it useful? Is it productive for the person on the other side or people who are on the other side that you're in conversation with?

[00:05:20] Here's question type number two. Now, like the others, the wording changes with this one too, and sometimes it's, "Why are you leaving?" Sometimes it's, "Why are you looking?" Sometimes it's just, "Hey, help me understand what's going on that's causing you to make a change."

[00:05:34] Whatever it is, underneath all of it, it's the same exact question. Why are you moving from where you are to what you want to do now? Or, you know, why did you already leave? I think there's a really interesting thing that happens over and over again here.

[00:05:51] When we're doing work with clients, there's often a concern that comes up, and that concern sounds like this. "I left this last role because it was a toxic situation, and I realized that it was no longer a fit for the new leadership that had come in overall. And even though it had been a great opportunity for me for the previous eight years, then in the last year, it's really changed a lot, and I just realized at some point that I don't want to be a part of that."

[00:06:20] Okay, so that's the point in time where I hear my team are often pausing and saying, "Hey, could you just tell them that?" And then at that point, our client usually thinks for a moment and says, "Yeah, I guess I could." What we often find is that people are worried about how they think that the truth is going to be perceived.

[00:06:39] And I want to give you a couple rules here to be able to use as you're creating useful answers. And that actually gives you a clue as to what one of those rules is. What is the productive version of the truth for the conversation, for the people who are involved? Now, that's very different than full transparency.

[00:06:58] The reality is that maybe you left and you were out on medical leave, or maybe you are leaving because the situation is intolerable. However, that's not necessarily useful in the conversation. So we want to focus on what is the productive truth that comes out. Not lying, not embellishing, but just sharing the pieces that are productive overall.

[00:07:19] Another question that we get asked is, "How do I tell the truth in a productive way about why I'm leaving?" So like in that example that I just gave you, this person realized that it was a phenomenal fit and it had changed, and that's the simplest version of the productive truth. So why wouldn't they share that?

[00:07:36] That's helpful to them, it's helpful to the other person, and it doesn't immerse them with useless, irrelevant details. If you're nervous about this, definitely work with an expert who can help you fine-tune the story around why you're leaving. But for the most part, that's a conversation we have over and over. Be able to share the truth in a productive way.

[00:07:56] Let's cover a third type of question that you've probably heard. I bet you have maybe even asked this if you're on the other side of the table as an interviewer. So that question is, "What are your strengths?" Okay, now, in this question, of course, it's asking something specific, and people ask this for different reasons.

[00:08:12] Sometimes this person wants to know what you're great at. Sometimes it is because they want to understand your ability to assess yourself. There's a whole variety of different reasons here. However, what's important here is most people tend to answer this with skills. "I'm good at Excel. I'm a strong writer or a strong communicator."

[00:08:33] Now, skills are great, they're useful, but they're not the same thing as what we call signature strengths. If somebody asks you that question, "What are your strengths?" Here's what I want you to do. It might sound like this. "One of the things that I love to do is I love to be able to anticipate what's gonna come in the future, and then I also love to be able to develop strategy around how do we get there and put a plan into place. Yes, I know that sounds absurd. Yes, I know that's a weird thing to really enjoy doing, but it definitely is true for me, and I can give you a little bit more context. Is it okay if I share an example of how that actually happened in reality where I did that?"

[00:09:13] Okay, now, a couple things are important here.

[00:09:15] First of all, it allows you to be able to acknowledge what you loved, which then people automatically associate with, you are great in these areas. That's just built into that human psychology we were talking about earlier. And then what the extra bonus is, you're asking permission to be able to share an actual real-world example.

[00:09:33] That's what is going to take it out of the "I'm great at writing," or, "I'm a great communicator," and instead make it much more palatable. 'Cause this then allows you to share a story, and you can take that extra step, and the story is what is going to resonate with people. We'll talk about why here in just a little bit.

[00:09:52] So what about the flip side? What if we're talking about weaknesses? How do you handle that? Well, here's a great way. Our goal here is to be able to flip it around. First, communicate what it is that our weaknesses are, what are our areas that are not our strengths, if you will, and then to be able to turn it around for how you leveraged your strengths in order to handle those weaknesses.

[00:10:13] Here's what it might sound like; I conventionally have not been great in handling the tiny details. I tend to get bored, and that's not the super fun part for me, which means that I've had to, over the last 25 years, find ways to be able to compensate for that. Now, one of the things that I am great at is being able to hire talent and being able to recognize where other people are phenomenal at.

[00:10:40] Naturally, I've been able to leverage that in identifying other people that really love those details, that are surrounded by that, and to be able to take on those pieces of work, and, yeah, that's worked really well in the last three roles. However, here's another thing that I've learned, too, is, hey, I can actually leverage AI to hold a lot of those details.

[00:11:01] So just by having a transcript for every single meeting, it saves me the ability of focusing on every single tiny, little detail in real time that just is painful for me, and instead, I can have a quick summary at the end to capture all of those details and be able to share them with whoever is needing that information.

[00:11:22] It allows me to be able to do both. The strength for me, in this case, is I actually really enjoy finding new types of technologies, which is what allowed me to realize that I can leverage AI in that particular way in the first place. Okay. So what I've done here is we've acknowledged what that non-strength is, even more so than weakness, and then we've pivoted back to discussing the strength in the first place.

[00:11:45] So what we're doing is we're keeping the focus on the areas where I am the best at and the areas that I actually want to spend time in. Now, that leads us to another important factor here. Be careful what you talk about here. This is worth understanding your strengths at a very specific level, because what you communicate in this area is what you're gonna get hired for.

[00:12:08] And if you are communicating something that you actually don't wanna spend time doing, then it's a little bit of a bait and switch in the first place, and they're not gonna be getting what they thought they're getting, and you're not going to be getting what you actually want to spend your time on.

[00:12:23] This leads us into a completely different set of questions. Remember how I mentioned just a little bit ago we're gonna build some stories? Well, that becomes relevant.

[00:12:32] Question type number four. This is a question type that many people dread. If I say, "Tell me about a time that you've worked through a conflict with someone on your team," yeah, most people, not that excited about that.

[00:12:43] Often people say, "I hate those questions," or, "It feels like a trap." But here's the really interesting part here. These are a certain specific type of questions. They're called behavior-based questions, and what most people don't realize, including many hiring managers, is these are actually the most valid type of interview questions if you really want to learn how somebody's going to perform on the job.

[00:13:06] The reason is we're focused on specifics that occurred in the past, and that is one of the best indicators of future performance. There's quite a bit of research behind this. That's why when we're answering hypothetical questions like, "What would you do if a coworker missed a deadline?" Those, well, they're not that valid.

[00:13:25] It's not a reliable predictor of much of anything. But the thing that we need to focus on here is how do you handle these behavioral types of questions, so that instead of continuing to hate them or feeling like they're annoying, we can turn them into something that allows you to own the interview, own the conversation, and for the person that you're talking to or people that you're interacting with to have a phenomenal experience, and they can't imagine anybody else in the role.

[00:13:52] What most people do is they try to prep for almost every version of this question that they can imagine, and they try to anticipate what people are going to ask. The problem with this is there's no end to those list of questions, whether it's tell me about a time you led a project or tell me about a time you failed or any other version of that.

[00:14:11] Tell me about a time you disagreed with your boss. There's infinite questions out there and pre-writing an answer to each one is absolutely a losing game. So instead, what we want to do is we want to use the same type of approach that Pixar uses when it's building movies. What do I mean? Well, we're going to create stories here, but here's why.

[00:14:33] If I have 15 to 20 stories that I am adept at telling, they feel genuine, I feel very comfortable with them, then it becomes much more a part of the conversation itself. And no matter what question comes up, I can probably take one of those 15 to 20 stories and adapt it to that particular question versus the other way is I cannot come up with infinite right answers.

[00:14:57] So it's a much more strategic approach, but it allows you to be able to prep in a way that's useful for you, useful for the other people, and quite frankly, a lot easier for a lot different result. So here's how it works. When we're creating stories, we use a framework called the SBO method. I mentioned that this is something that HR didn't invent, talent acquisition didn't invent.

[00:15:20] It's borrowed from professional storytellers. It's the same basic structure that Pixar used to build Toy Story. Now, we start with the 'Situation', that's the S, in terms of what happened? Like, what's the backstory here? What do people need to know about it? What's relevant? And then the 'Behavior', which means what did you do?

[00:15:40] How did you handle it? What was the action that was taking place there? And then the 'Outcome', and that can be what happened in the end, what is the thing that you learned, what is the result that somebody got? Okay, let's give you an example of what that sounds like in practice. So I might start with the situation, and let's say that the question here that I'm answering is, "Tell me about a time that you worked through a conflict with someone on your team."

[00:16:05] Okay. The situation might be about two years into the role. I had a peer on another team who I disagreed with constantly, and this wasn't really a problem until we had worked together on a pretty large, pretty intense project overall, and we realized that it was really starting to slow both of our teams down.

[00:16:23] Now, instead of going to my boss, who was the VP at the time, I asked her to go grab coffee and, yeah, just asked what was going on. I had shared with her that I was noticing that we're disagreeing over and over again, and I was seeing [00:16:40] evidence that it was holding both our teams back here, and I just wanted to understand what was happening.

[00:16:45] After I shared that with her, she told me, "You know what? I actually thought that you were trying to take credit for my team's work." Turns out this wasn't true, but totally understood why she looked at it that way from where she's at. Now, after this, it's pretty cool what happened here. The way that we worked through it is we built a habit of checking in with each other before either of us presented anything that touched the other's work.

[00:17:07] And a year and a half later, she was the one who nominated me for a cross-team award. Now, notice what's happening here. We have a clear situation and what the behavior is, what I did, and what the outcome was. I want to, of course, adapt it so that it's relevant. But if I know the general flow of the story overall and I've prepared that in advance, then it gives me the ability to change it on the fly during an actual interview, an actual conversation, an actual interaction, no matter where it is.

[00:17:38] A lot of times people ask, like, "How do I come up with all of these stories? Like, 15 to 20 seems like a lot." And it certainly can be. It can feel like a lot to start with. But here's what I would encourage you to think of. Places to start developing a list of stories. Number one, I want you to think about what are some of the hardest or most challenging times that you've experienced, either inside of work, outside of work, projects, time periods, whatever it is.

[00:18:01] Or number two, what are you most proud of? Or number three, you know, where did you find success in places that most people wouldn't have experienced success? Usually between those three questions, that's enough to get you started, and then you can start building out a list and developing each item on that list into an SBO story.

[00:18:20] Pretty cool, right? Okay. Then when you walk into an interview, you have an entire inventory to be able to pull from and choose exactly what's right and what's most relevant. What we're doing, what you'll notice here, is we're engineering the process for success through this type of interview interaction.

[00:18:37] But it'll also come up where you'll just actually become a better storyteller overall in other conversations too, whether it is related to getting a job or just every day. The people at Pixar can't be wrong.

[00:18:49] Okay, this last one, this last question type, it's one that causes a lot of trepidation for some really talented, really experienced people all over the world.

[00:18:58] So many people wonder, "How do I address gaps on my resume?" If you've got space of any kind between roles, whether it's a few days sometimes or a few years, a lot of people are really concerned about, "How am I going to address this gap?" Now, one thing I wanna reassure you is that compared to 40 years ago, even 20 years ago, honestly, gaps are much more socially acceptable in almost all environments.

[00:19:23] Most people have some kind of a gap on their resume at this point. You might even be in the minority if you don't. So the expectations have changed, certainly. But there's still a lot of fear around this question. So how do we handle it? What does it sound like in practice? The general rule is always the same. How do we share the truth in a way that's productive?

[00:19:42] Instead, here's what that might sound like. It might sound like, "Hey, I worked with this organization and was there for, you know, 15 years, and it was actually a really wonderful experience. I got to learn a lot, got promoted, you know, multiple times. And what ended up happening is about a year and a half ago, we experienced a merger.

[00:20:01] The company sold, you know, merged together, and what that meant is all of the leaders that I was accustomed to working with and just really genuinely had a lot of shared values, they disappeared overnight. And so new leadership came in, and I think it was absolutely the right thing to do for the company at that point in time, but the leadership team that came in, I realized pretty quickly that we had very different values.

[00:20:24] And I thought, 'Maybe it'll change, maybe it'll get better,' and I ended up making the choice to leave. I took some time off in between because I really wanted to recover. I didn't realize how much it was having an impact on me. And it also changed what I realized that I want for my next opportunity, which is one of the reasons why I'm here, because I believe that this organization and the people in this organization are much more aligned with what I truly value."

[00:20:51] Okay, so what we've done there are a few different things. We've taken the situation at hand, and could've been a pretty terrible situation, and then we've turned it around and helped to explain what occurred at a productive level, and then be able to share how that led to where you are now. Pretty easy framework to move on.

[00:21:14] It still actually follows that same SBO. Like, here was the situation, here was what I did and what I experienced, and here was what happened in the end. In this case, I'm sharing, like, what I learned and what caused me to be able to make this choice for why I'm here in front of you at this moment.

[00:21:31] Pretty cool, right? So this example shares the true facts, but a really specific frame. We're not hiding what happened. We're choosing to share the details that serve the conversation that I'm in. Now, we've talked through these five different types of questions, and they all are pretty common. They're all gonna come up in some form or another, probably in your next interview, maybe even an informal interview for sure.

[00:21:53] But what we haven't covered is how do we bring in the age and executive level nuances here. And I think that there's something that a lot of people don't really think about, especially if you haven't had to interview for a role in a while, and you now find yourself at a senior level or in a executive type of role.

[00:22:13] And what you'll find is that the higher you go, the conversations tend to be less interview-feeling, where I'm asking a ton of questions and then expecting a ton of answers, and much more a conversation about often philosophy and strategy and other elements. So we're operating at a little bit higher level.

[00:22:37] Why does that happen? Well, the assumption at this point is that you can do the job. We're not talking about your specific how you handle these types of experiences. That tends to be built in once you get to the executive or senior level. Instead, we're much more focused on what type of impact are you going to create.

[00:22:56] We're much more focused on is this going to be an organizational fit. We're much more focused on do we share the same values and philosophy, especially as you're leading teams or having that very different impact on the organization. Here's why I point this out, though. If you're interviewing at any level, but especially the further that you go up, if you happen to be in a senior role or at that executive level, it matters a lot that you are very clear on what is important to you, that you're very clear on what you're looking for, and you're able to articulate that in a conversation on purpose every single time.

[00:23:32] That lack of clarity for yourself will result in two different things. One, you're gonna come off completely different. You're gonna come off in a way where they don't want you leading a section of their organization because, as humans, we tend to respond differently to clarity. We tend to feel much more trust when there is a level of clarity.

[00:23:53] And we also tend to see that clarity show up in explaining what you stand for or why you're here or why you're making this particular type of change or what is important to you. The other thing to consider here is that if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, I promise you, you're gonna end up in a situation that is not a phenomenal fit.

[00:24:15] That doesn't happen by accident. It only happens by understanding exactly what you want to the level at which you can communicate that to other people in conversations. Now, of course, if you want help with doing that, that's part of what we do as an organization. It's what we love to do, and we are truly great at it.

[00:24:32] I would suggest you want interview help or even help figuring out what you actually stand for, what you want, what creates a phenomenal career for you, then drop me an email, scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put 'Conversation' in the subject line. And what I'll do is I'll introduce you to my team, the right person on my team, and we'll have a conversation. We'll figure out what is the very best way that we can help support your goals. Until next time, I'm Scott. Adios. I'm out.