The landscape for job seekers today is more treacherous than at any time in recent memory. In other words, if you want a job today, you may actually have to work for it.

Just a few months ago, the job interview was an opportunity for candidates to present their demands and screen the best offers. Today the tide has turned and employers are running the show again. It’s no longer enough to be qualified. If you want a job in today’s business environment, you have to shine in the job interview.

One way to really shine is by asking questions. Questions are the best way for you to demonstrate that you understand the company’s challenges, emphasize how you can help the company meet them, and show your interest in the most unmistakable manner possible—by actually asking for the position. This book will help arm you with new interview questions and techniques for selling yourself and getting the job you want.

After more than a decade of job seekers calling the shots, the collapse of the dot-com economy has resulted in a much more restricted hiring environment. Employers can now afford to be much more choosy. With dozens or even hundreds of applicants competing for every job, employers are raising their standards.

Competition for jobs has never been higher. The ease of recruiting with the Internet has radically decreased the expense of accumulating resumes. Today, you are competing not only with other job seekers from the same community, but with highly qualified people from all over the world. Scared and frustrated, employees still fortunate to have a job are staying put, decreasing opportunities for career advancement.

For organizations, the stakes for making the right hiring decision are higher than ever before. Business moves more quickly today than ever before. Organizations are leaner and more networked. If a critical task is not performed, the whole operation is at risk of falling apart. Often a critical hire is all that stands between organizational failure and success. Organizations today have no guarantee of second chances. They must get it right the first time.

In their struggle to survive, increasingly lean organizations are making decisions that also raise the ante for job seekers. Companies today are putting a premium on human productivity. They want to hire people who can add significant value from Day One. Any job candidate who cannot demonstrate his or her value proposition within a few minutes into the job interview cannot be expected to advance.

Few organizations today are content to hire merely qualified performers capable of acceptable performance. In a buyer’s market, they feel they don’t have to settle for anything less than superstars at every level of the company. These organizations look for individuals who have demonstrated consistently outstanding results as well as the ability to stretch well beyond traditional measures of performance. These are the movers and change agents who can apply thought leadership to the challenges of the organization.

Interviewers today want to see immediate evidence that you are action-oriented, engaged with the long-term, committed, zestful, and curious. These are the attributes that will get you a job. If you act passive, disengaged, short-term driven, self-centered, and apathetic, you’ll be passed over. Your ability to ask meaningful questions will tell the interviewer if you display the first set of attributes or the latter.

Does the contemporary job interview seem like a high hurdle to jump? It is. And you won’t get more than a few minutes to demonstrate that you are a world-class contributor.

Organizations have beefed up the entire employee selection process to weed out the amateurs, imposters and other wanna-bees. The job interview has received more than its share of attention as a critical vehicle to achieve organizational goals. If you have been interviewing, you know that employers have developed dramatically more sophisticated interviewing and selection techniques. You see evidence of these developments in every aspect of the selection process from the job interview to exhaustive background checks and drug testing. This book gives you a shot at understanding what you will be up against in the new world of job interviews.

Many job hunters think their primary goal is to get to the job interview. Wrong! If you think the primary goal of the job hunter is to get a job offer, you are getting warmer, but you are still a day late and dollar short. In reality, the primary goal of the job hunter is to get an offer for a job that is a good fit with his or her short- and long-term requirements. In other words, a position that is sustainable for both the job hunter and the employer.

To succeed at this part of the job hunt requires the job seeker to interview the interviewer. By this point in the process, the chemistry between the employer and job seeker should be pretty good. If there are any remaining candidates, their abilities should be fairly similar, so you are now competing on softer issues. If you are still in the running, chances are the employer wants to hire you at least as much as you want to be hired. Now the tables are turned and it is your opportunity to determine if this is the job that’s best for your career. Now you get to interview the interviewer, and in doing so you have another opportunity to reinforce your desirability as the best candidate for the job. This book shows you how.

To ground the book in reality, I’ve asked hundreds of recruiters, job coaches, and hiring managers for the most memorably good and bad questions they have heard from job candidates. Some of these questions are brilliant in their insight, depth, and elegance. Others are just as effective in terminating the interview with extreme prejudice. Whether the questions are memorably good or memorably bad, learn from the former and avoid the latter. The best of these memorable questions, with comments from the recruiters, are peppered throughout the book and are separately indexed in the back.

201 Best Questions to Ask On Your Interview is published by McGraw-Hill.

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