Program Manager

It will show you what’s important to them at work: green credentials, career progression, work/life balance, working for a big brand etc. It will also tell you if they are actively job hunting or whether they saw your ad and couldn’t resist (either is fine).

A Project Manager has to deal with uncertainty. It is important that they can identify and prioritize risks and take appropriate action in ambiguous situations. It is equally important to manage others’ concerns in changing environments. To assess competency in this area, it is best to ask scenario-based questions.

Success and failures, these are inevitable facts of life and your professional career as well. Do not even think to answer “No, I never failed in a project”. This will not be counting a positive mark in your evaluation believe me.

Actually, this project manager interview question assesses your risk management experience. Therefore, think of an event, meeting, activity or a moment in project where you had trouble. Then, answer this question accordingly.

This gives you an indication of how they do their job. Someone who spends all day at the PC may suit your environment, or you might be looking for a project manager who gets out and visits clients most days of the week. Remember that they might be prepared to do something other than what they do now, so if you hear something that doesn’t fit with the post you are recruiting for, don’t rule them out before exploring this further.

As an experienced professional, you are bound to have a portfolio, and this is the right time to share such a portfolio with the interviewer. Make sure that the portfolio you share is authentic as your previous portfolio will decide whether the interviewer will be interested in you or not.

A project manager has to take into consideration several disagreements. They can be between employees, between the superior and the employees, or even the client and the employees.

If you reply that you have never had any disagreements, the interviewer will wonder whether you were really a project manager for your skills or simply because you are a people pleaser.

Make sure that you come up with at least one incident where employees and superiors had differences in thought and you were instrumental in changing the scenario.

A Project Manager relies on their team to execute activities in order to achieve the desired results. It is important that a Project Manager can assess talent, contribute actively towards developing team members, offer constructive feedback, and mentor and coach their team members. Responses to the following questions will reveal if the candidate is someone able to motivate the members of a team.

A Project Manager needs to identify and prevent issues from impacting the project adversely. It is important that the candidate demonstrates they are able to take proactive steps, avoid procrastination, and not shy away from making tough decisions. I usually ask candidates to share examples and real-life scenarios from their projects and life where they made proactive decisions.

Project team motivation is crucial for the success of a project. If a project team is not motivated, it will be impossible to reach project objectives. Or, even if you reach your project objectives, project quality will suffer.

This project manager interview question is critical to get insights about the people management skills of the candidate.