Interview Questions
Prepare your answers to questions below. Ensure you don't waffle your answers, try to give real examples to back up your answers whilst being brief and to the point. The questions will often be deliberately open ended. This ensures that you do not answer just yes or no. Below is a non exhaustive list of some questions you may be asked.
- Why are you not being retained on qualification? Why do you want to leave the firm you have trained with?
- What do you enjoy about your current role? What do you not enjoy?
- Why have you applied for this job? What do you know about the vacancy?
- Why are you looking to join us? How much do you know about us?
- What have been the key achievements in your professional and non-professional life?
- Where does your initial interest in law stem from?
- What successes have you enjoyed in your current role? How did you achieve these?
- How would your boss/team describe you?
- What do you want to achieve over the next 2/3/5 years?
- What are your strengths and weaknesses?
- How good are you at: time recording, dealing with targets; organising your day; prioritising?
- When have you ever worked under pressure?
- Give an example of how you have worked as part of a team
- What difficulties have you encountered in your current job and how have you overcome them?
- What is your ideal job?
- How IT literate are you?
- What do you like to do outside of work?
- What motivates you?
- What is the reason why your academics might not be better?
- You will need to prepare some questions to ask at interview. A good interviewer may already have answered most of your questions. Ideally you will have developed a good rapport with the interviewer and will ask questions throughout the interview rather than save them all to the end. Here are some suggestions.
Questions to ask at Interview
- How has this position become available? (i.e. growth or replacement?)
- How would you describe the culture of the organisation? Team spirited? Open door policy?
- Is the office open plan or cellular?
- What are the future plans of the business/department?
- What types of individuals are in the department currently?
- How do you appraise the performance of your staff?
- How many files on average does each fee earner handle?
- What type of work would I handle in this role?
- Does the organisation encourage marketing by younger members of staff?
- How many chargeable hours are staff expected to bill per month?
- What IT systems do you have in place currently?
- How much training, support and development opportunity will there be?
- What are the long term prospects for the person who gets this job?
- When am I likely to hear if I have been successful at this stage of the process?
- What is the next stage of the recruitment process?
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