Winning Answers to Job Interview Questions for Aspiring Managers and Executives

Winning Answers to Job Interview Questions for Aspiring Managers and Executives by Lavie Margolin, published in 2015, is a practical guide to surviving that peculiar modern ritual in which two or more people sit in a room and politely attempt to determine whether you are competent, ambitious, emotionally stable and capable of describing your weaknesses without accidentally telling the truth. This book is aimed specifically at people trying to move into management or executive roles, which means the questions become slightly more dangerous than ?Where do you see yourself in five years?? Now we are into leadership. Strategy. Conflict. Decision-making. People management. And the great corporate art of explaining how you once solved a problem without admitting that the problem was created by somebody sitting three chairs away. Lavie Margolin focuses on the kinds of interview questions likely to arise when employers are assessing candidates for roles with more responsibility. That means not just what you have done, but how you think. How you handle pressure. How you manage people. How you deal with failure. How you motivate teams. And whether you can use the phrase ?stakeholder engagement? without visible discomfort. The great challenge of management interviews is that the candidate is expected to sound confident without sounding arrogant, ambitious without sounding dangerous, honest without revealing anything alarming, and experienced without implying they are too expensive. This is a surprisingly narrow path. Hence the usefulness of preparation. The book helps readers think through common questions and formulate stronger responses rather than relying on the traditional technique of inventing an answer halfway through the sentence. That technique remains popular. It is not always successful. There is particular value in understanding what the interviewer is actually asking. ?Tell me about a time you dealt with conflict? does not usually mean: ?Please tell us about the worst argument you ever had.? It means: ?Can you demonstrate judgement, restraint, communication and some evidence that nobody had to call security?? Similarly, ?What is your leadership style?? is not an invitation to say: ?I prefer people to do what I tell them.? Even if that is technically accurate. Books like this are useful because interviews are artificial situations. Most people do not spend ordinary working days being asked to summarise their career philosophy in ninety seconds while three strangers make notes. Interview performance is therefore a skill in its own right. A person can be excellent at the job and still be terrible at explaining why. Conversely, some people are excellent at interviews and apparently spend the remainder of their careers demonstrating that this was their principal professional achievement. This book is intended to help the first group catch up with the second. Published in 2015 , it also comes from the era when competency-based questions, behavioural interviewing and structured responses had become firmly established in recruitment. Employers wanted examples. Candidates learned to prepare stories. Everybody became very interested in situations, tasks, actions and results. The workplace eventually produced an acronym for this, because no corporate process is considered complete until it has one. For aspiring managers and executives, the book can therefore serve as both preparation and reassurance. The questions become less intimidating when you have already considered them. The answers become sharper when they are built around actual examples. And the interview becomes marginally less like being unexpectedly examined by people who have hidden your CV somewhere on the table. It should appeal to jobseekers, career changers, newly promoted managers and anyone preparing for an interview where the words leadership , strategy , performance and vision are likely to appear with suspicious frequency. Condition: Good. A sound used copy with n.…