Host: What kind of questions might surprise me?

Louise Kursmark: Well, there are a couple of different styles of interview question. In addition to the typical questions, Tell me about yourself. What is your experience as a Java Programmer? You are likely to get behavior based interviewing questions. That is a style that s been around for about 30 years and what it means that you are going to be asked for a specific example, Tell me about a time when you had a difficult programming challenge or a tight timeline? How did you deal with it and what was the result? As you can see, you can not memorize answers to questions like that. So, you have to be relatively quick on your feet with thinking about the specific examples and stories that you are going to tell the interviewer. Another type of question that you might get is what I call the Off-the-wall question which is, If you were an ice-cream, what flavor would you be? You might wonder why employers are asking that kind of question. Every employer, every person that you meet with has his or her preferences for the type of question that they think is most appropriate and most revealing of the candidate. As an interviewee, you have to go with the flow and do your best to answer the questions and I would not obsess too much about the Off the wall questions. They are hard to prepare for. I would just do what seems sensible due with the time and always be thinking about how can I present information that is going to support the message that I am trying to communicate in this interview, that I am a problem solver or an effective communicator or somebody who is good at a particular skill. Always be looking for examples; always be looking for opportunities to keep getting that message across regardless of the type of question.