Ace Your Project Interview

I recently read an article with some staggering statistics, 40% of employees are considering resignation. If you're finding yourself applying to a role that requires project experience, you need to master the answers on project management. In this episode, I give you insider tips on how to nail the interview questions. 

Article that explains stage gate process

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Transcript

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Omar (00:00):

Okay. Hello everybody. And welcome to another episode of the Omar project. I'm really excited about today's guest, but before we get started, I want to make sure I invite you to join the Omar project.com. That's spelled O M a R because you can get a lot of great insight on project management and skills you need to up your game and also learn from the best project managers in the world on the most complex projects. Hey, this is Omar with the Omar project. And today we're going to talk about

Speaker 2 (00:35):

Hiring for project manager position. But before we do that, let's talk a little bit about why this topic is so relevant. Right now, I was reading an article the other day, and it mentioned in the title of the article is called the great resignation, the coming way for companies. And what it talks about is how right now in this time period in American history, we're having more resignations. More people at companies are resigning, changing jobs, leaving whatever they were doing and branching out into something else. And there's a whole bunch of theories of why this is happening. Some people are debating in that it's, you know, it could be COVID that's causing that. Maybe some people are having a realization that life is short and they want to do what they want to do. Whatever the case we're seeing that upwards of 25 to 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs.

Speaker 2 (01:27):

And a lot of them are doing it right now. So this is something that's happening in the country. And there's only one way to prepare for it really, besides doing the homework where you want to jump to is if you're going to go work for another job, and if you're not working for yourself, you're going to be interviewing. And you're going to run into a hiring manager. And that hiring manager is going to ask you some questions. These are a couple tips that you can use. If you're going to be interviewed for a project management type position or a leadership position that involves some awareness of the project management process. These are a couple of things I'm going to give you that you can work on. So the first is, do you understand how a project process works? Now? That's not going to be the interview question probably, but you can have a question.

Speaker 2 (02:16):

That's going to test your knowledge of the process and why this is important is because the hiring manager usually may have a immediate gap that they need to fill and understanding the project process, which is each stage of how you develop a process. So each project process, no matter what industry it's in is using a Stage-Gate process. So it's like, you start with the idea, you move into concept, then you move into defining it and then executing and then operating. But do you know how to, to actually move it through each of those phases? That's one thing they may be looking to test and understand. And every healthy organization, even at a startup is going to have some sort of process on how they do that. So knowing this and not starting from zero, which if you don't know this, then there's some teaching involved.

Speaker 2 (03:04):

There's some coaching. You may not understand that you, sometimes you need to slow down a little bit to move faster. That portion of it is very important to a hiring manager. So explain this. And if you don't understand, this is something that you need to study and you can study it really easily. It's available online anywhere you can go to there's tons of sources on how to understand this portion of a project process and really what the key things are for each step. The second question that you may get, or what topic could be resolved is understanding if you have the skillset already for project management. So yeah, one of the things which this will be a more kind of detailed follow up to the original question would be, do you know how to move an idea into the operate stage? Or could you explain that?

Speaker 2 (03:50):

And there might be some follow-ups about like how you could check that no, that a project is ready to go for funding or how it's, how do you know a project is ready to go to the next phase or taxi start? If you're able to answer those questions, you're able to show a lot of awareness of what actual process would be, how you would go about doing it. And if you're a leader in these positions, you should be able to answer these things. You know, just off the top of your head, if you can't answer these two questions and don't worry, I'll link to an article that you can read up and answer it in the show notes. And I have some other resources on my blog, the Omar project.com. You can look into there and you can get this information. These are all things that you can learn.

Speaker 2 (04:28):

So I wouldn't be concerned about it unless you're actually going into a project management position, that's a leader in project management, and then these things should be the bread and butter of what you're doing. And if you're trying to just read up on this for the day, I think you're probably setting yourself up for quite a bit of a learning curve. The other question that they may ask is, do you understand how your role adds value to the overall objective? And this is not a question that they're going to ask straight up, but what they're looking for the hiring manager will be looking for is, do you have self-aware in your position? Do you know how your position, whether it's in projects or project leadership ties to the overall bigger picture, and this can be asked in a number of different ways, but typically they'll want to bring out whatever you're doing and say, well, how does this impact the company or, or what happens if this doesn't work out?

Speaker 2 (05:18):

Those are types of questions that can test how you understand the value of what you're doing. And this is a, is a good question because it separates the people that are, you know, big picture. It can understand kind of where they fit in or have the self-awareness to do that, versus those that can't. And lastly, the question that every hiring manager is going to want to know is dealing with conflict. And why does this so relevant in projects? Because by default, a project is a organization. It's a structure it's never one person. Otherwise it would not be a project. It's usually a team people completing multiple tasks in parallel. And because you have teams of people, of course, you're going to have sometimes conflict, it could be personality conflicts, it could be conflicts over scope and who does what it could be conflicts on when we go forward or what's technically sound, there's so many different types of conflict, but they all at the end of the day involve people's opinions and their thoughts.

Speaker 2 (06:15):

And one of the most important skill sets that you will have, or that needs to be shown as a project manager or project leader, is that you can deal with some of these challenges. So this is one that can be asked in a lot of different questions or a lot of different ways. So tell me about a time when you've dealt with conflict. Tell me about a time when you've dealt with some people not getting along or not being on the same page with the outcome. These are things that would help the interviewer answer these questions in his mind. There's also challenges here about explaining this in a way that makes it very clear to the hiring manager, how you dealt with the conflict. Now, this is something that if you haven't interviewed in a while, it's something to remember that going into these interviews needs to be super clear that where your role is in it.

Speaker 2 (07:03):

Oftentimes people kind of say, we are our team, or that's not clear. That's not clear to anybody what you actually did in it. And the more descriptive you can be in how you impacted the outcome, how you were involved in this whole story is what's going to allow people to say, okay, look, he stepped in, or she, and they were able to have a conversation with them and blah, blah. This is how they resolved the thing that is actually very valuable to understand how you operate, how you work and how you kind of think through problems and solve what's going to happen, which is conflict. All right, well, now you have a couple of different tools or questions that you can be prepared for for the next project management or leadership based interview. You have that revolves around project management processes or people. I hope this

Speaker 3 (07:48):

Helps. And if you do have an experience in an interview, and this did help you send

Omar (07:53):

Me an email podcast@theomarproject.com, I would love to hear about it. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you'd like to hear more, you can join us at wwww.theomarproject.com. That's O M A R. We have a lot more information on project management, technical skills on the leadership. And also you can hear from more of the top experts in the field.