[MUSIC] In this lesson you'll learn about the different types of interviews you may face. You'll learn about remote interviews, in-person interviews, team interviews, stress interviews, and case interviews. [MUSIC] A remote interview is typically done early in the interviewing process. It might be over the phone, it might be via Skype. It might even be via video conference hook up. This type of interview is typically a screening interview. That means your interviewer is likely to be either a telephone screener or a recruiting specialist. As you learned back in course one, the primary objective of the screening interview is to remove you from active consideration before scheduling an in-person interview. The screener's goal is to separate the wheat from the chaff for the hiring manager. Common reasons for being weeded out at this stage include discrepancies between your resume and actual experience, poor verbal communication skills, or lack of the qualifications outlined in the organization's job description. Later in this specialization, you will learn more about how to prepare for and perform well on a phone interview. [MUSIC] The in-person interview is on-site at the company's location. You may be interviewed by multiple people, one at a time. You may be interviewed by a panel or team of people. You may be interviewed by a single hiring manager. You may be scheduled for multiple in-person interviews over a series of days or even longer. The strategies you learn in this and the next course will help you succeed at in-person interviews. [MUSIC] A unique format for the in-person interview is the team interview, or panel interview. Typically you meet with a group of interviewers around a table in a conference room. The interview team or panel often sits around the table with you at the head. Members of the interview panel may be from your prospective department or may be a cross-section of employees from throughout the company. One of the most important things to remember in an interview like this is to make eye contact with everyone on the panel, even when responding to a question posed by an individual panelist. Just take your time and treat every member of the team with the same respect you would the hiring manager. [MUSIC] Instead of being interviewed by a simultaneous panel of multiple people, you might be interviewed by multiple people one at a time, in a serial format. If you're asked many of the same questions but by different people, be sure to vary your answers. Use your preparation, talk about different projects, different experiences, different successes, and even different failures. Otherwise when the individual interviewers meet to compare notes, you'll come of as one-dimensional. Instead, use the serial interview format to showcase your adaptability. [MUSIC] Instead of a pleasant, so tell me about yourself, the interviewer snarls at you, so why the hell should I hire you for anything? Welcome to the so-called stress interview. Many of you, depending on the positions you're targeting, will never face a stress interview. If you're not interviewing for a job as a stock broker or an air traffic controller or a prison guard, then you might well never face a stress interview, or not. Maybe you're going for a technical position and you're thinking, have they served me up one of those questions like how many grains of chromium pyruvate would fit in a 19th century English finger bowl? Well, that's going to be a real stress interview. Or maybe you just think, any interview in English, well that's a stress interview. But no, the stress interview is a specific format designed to evaluate how you respond to hostility, how you respond to terrible conditions, high pressure stress. A client screaming at you because he lost money on your stock recommendation, three jet airliners whose pilots don't seem to speak much English, a prison lifer who's plotting ways to kill you, those are extreme examples. But some companies use these interviews, these stress interviews to find out how you handle stress. You'll know you're facing a stress interview if you're facing several interviewers who glare at you, or who fire questions that are rude, rapid pace. Or if you face an interview who ridicules everything you say or challenges every answer, who stares out the window and seems to be completely uninterested in anything you have to say. Those are deliberate tactics to subject you to stress. And the key to surviving stress interviews, remain calm, keep a sense of humor, and avoid getting angry or defensive. We have a saying in English, never let them see you sweat. Recognize the situation for what it is, nothing more than an artificial scenario designed to see how you react under pressure. It's a game to see if you will become depressed, hostile, or upset when facing adversity. You win the game by keeping your cool. Of course if you're interviewing with a company that uses these techniques, you may very well question whether you would be advised to take a job with them in the first place. [MUSIC] In the next course, you'll learn about situational questions. These are questions that present you with a hypothetical situation that might occur on the job. The interviewer wants to see the extent to which you demonstrate the traits needed to successfully handle the situation. Now many interviews feature one or two of these questions to see how you analyze an unfamiliar problem, see how you develop a strategy to solve it. However, some positions rely more heavily on these types of questions, and present candidates with what is known as a case interview. The case interview format is used by management consulting firms as well as investment banking companies. If you're a business school student, you probably already know something about how to handle the case interview. Many business school courses revolve around case analysis. And many business students have become adept at analyzing business cases. If you are targeting any of these big management consulting companies, you'll need to prepare for case interviews. These interviews evaluate the skills that are needed to succeed in management consulting. You'll need to demonstrate not only quantitative and analytical skills but especially sophisticated interpersonal skills. The reason is simple. These are employees who must act as professional advisers to high level managers. We do not focus on case interviews in this specialization, but if you feel you need extra preparation for these, then I'd recommend Victor Cheng's CaseInterview.com. Victor Cheng is a former McKinsey and Company management consultant, and his case interview preparation course has yielded notable successes for his students. In this specialization, we focus on the many flavors of in-person interviews, as well as the closely-related remote interview. In the following lessons, Daniela Wagner-Loera, my co-instructor who you met in the first course, will lead you through strategies and language for answering traditional job interview questions. You may face these in remote interviews, but you will certainly face them in in-person interviews. These questions are broad based. They're designed to find out first if you have the skills and abilities to perform the job. Second, whether you have the enthusiasm and work ethic the employer expects. And third, whether you will be a good fit for the culture of the organization you're applying to. Daniela will start you off in the next lesson with strategies for preparing for an interview for a specific job posting, and I'll see you in the next module. [MUSIC]
