From the book How to Prepare for an Employment Interview.
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This book shows you how to sell yourself in an employment interview.
If your interview is not for an advertised opening, you may just be asked "so, what brings you here?" or "okay, explain what you think you can do for us." You'll have to be prepared to take it from there -- asking the employer questions to bring out their needs and problems, and presenting your abilities as the answer to those problems.
In this case, your "interview" does take on the format of a sales call.
If you expect to be arranging several interviews of this type, you should develop your sales skills-asking questions and active listening in particular. We'll go through the fundamental approach to asking questions in a sales call-style interview in Chapter 14.
Less structured interviews allow more give-and-take between you and the interviewer. The majority of employment interviews for advertised positions, on the other hand, begin with the interviewer asking all the questions they have prepared.
This usually takes up at least 75 percent of the total time of the interview.
Go on enough interviews, and you'll be amazed by how idiosyncratic some questions are. Some interviewers have pet questions that you won't come across anywhere else-like Barbara Walters's "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" question.
Unless you're given the questions in advance, there's no way you can go in with answers ready for everything (which is why some interviewers like odd questions-they know you haven't got a rehearsed answer; that the question is completely irrelevant to how well you'd do the job is a secondary concern to them).
Accept this. Don't worry about it. It's really not that important.
What is important is that...
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