Job interviews are one of life’s necessary evils. I should know—I’ve had a lot of them.
I’ve also conducted my fair share, learning a lot along the way. I’d like to share these learnings with y’all (I’m painfully British, so I can only get away with saying “y’all” on paper—please let me have it).
But first, a bit about me
My career to date (10 years so far and still hoping to find that low-key, low-stress but gratifying job that pays me a million pounds a year) has been in the charity sector in some form or other. I’m now in my 7th role.
So, on average, I spend a little under 18 months at each job before moving on (definitely lasted less time than that in a couple of places of employment). I get bored quickly, which makes project management in the third sector so appealing to me. Lots of projects, stakeholders, and teams, and absolutely no chance of getting bored.
I started off doing marketing admin (I learned and then immediately forgot how to do a mail merge) at an animal welfare charity in London and from there moved into the digital space, working for different charities along the way. Engaging in digital marketing, digital communications, digital fundraising, and then a spell in a volunteer role leading digital strategy at a conservation charity in Mozambique gave me brilliant experience across various causes, with different processes, personalities, and problems.
After Mozambique, I was fortunate enough to get a project management apprenticeship with the Developer Society, joining the first cohort of PM apprentices with the fantastic Louder Than Ten and PM legend Rachel Gertz. I spent four years at DEV before waving them a fond farewell and now find myself at an agency as a senior product manager, working with the third sector to design and build brilliant digital products for their users.
Throughout my experience, I have realized the most failproof way to ace an interview is to prepare equally for the questions that you will be asked as well as the questions you will ask. This is good practice for every field, but it’s essential in the vast and varied world of project management.
Common project manager interview questions and answers
Question: Why do you want this job?
Answer: I was drawn in by the case studies that you have on your website about [for example, animation, data visualizations, particular sector]. I have experience with [x] through my work with [x].
We all know that the actual answer to this is ‘so I can pay my rent/mortgage, buy toys for my dog, and maybe even go on holiday once in a while’, but this isn’t what your prospective employer wants to hear (although if someone said that to me in an interview, I’d be secretly impressed).
But no, the actual answer has to be about the company you’re interviewing with, and more specifically, how your skills and experience will help them to reach their goals. You need to understand their mission and vision to answer this, so do your research. You also need to have an excellent idea of your skills and experience. As PMs, we’re good generalists, so make sure you have a grab-bag of critical skills noted down that you want them to know about and why they should care about them.
Question: Tell us about a project that failed and how you handled it
Answer: I led a project to redesign and build an existing website, using an agile approach. The stakeholders were on board in theory with the elegant way of creating a backlog and prioritizing it, but when it came to the crunch, what they wanted and expected was more or less a clone of their old site, with the same features and functionality.
Therefore, we didn’t have the budget and the time to build the entire site. We had to have a frank conversation about what tasks were critical for launch and what we could push to a subsequent phase. That’s a crucial conversation to have with the biz dev team, too. It was a good lesson for me to ensure that the methodology fits the client and the project.
Have this one ready to go. When prepping for a job interview, it’s easy to only focus on all the things you’ve aced, but knowing how someone handles failure is essential. Did you lose your head and go to pieces, or did you take a deep breath, get the team out of trouble, and learn from the mistakes made? Even better, did you make changes to reduce the risk of those mistakes happening again?
Many companies profess to embrace failure, especially in the tech industry. Without failure, we can’t learn and make progress. But it’s a tricky mindset, and there has to be a balance. If every one of your projects fails, you’re likely not to be their first candidate. But if you can talk through a project failure and explain where things went wrong and what your role was in course-correcting, that’s an amazing skill to have, and you should talk it up.
Question: What’s your biggest weakness? Where do you think you’d need support from us?
Answer: I sometimes struggle to ask for help when I need it. Part of having imposter syndrome means it can be hard to ask for help, so a supportive work environment is really important to me and is part of my own project management skillset. I want people to be able to talk to me if they’re struggling or stuck, rather than say nothing for fear of looking weak or not good enough.
When prepping for my very first “grown-up” job, someone advised me to say “perfectionism” in response to this question. Don’t do this.
Think about your actual weaknesses. No one smashes everything all the time, and that’s ok. That’s how we progress and learn.
You need to be a bit tactical, of course—if you’re going for a job as an accountant, your response shouldn’t be ‘I don’t have a head for numbers’. So try to make sure you have a relevant yet not career-ending “weakness” in your back pocket that means you can answer the question honestly. When you get the job, maybe that weakness can be something you can delegate to someone else, or you can make it one of your personal development goals to improve at.
Question: Can you tell us about a project you’re proud of?
Answer: I worked on a project that supported vulnerable people in reaching out for help with their mental health, which is a topic very close to my heart. The client was a subject matter expert who naturally wanted to get as many features built as possible to deliver a brilliant product for the end user, so it was a real balancing act to ensure the features we were building were robust and useful while also ensuring we allowed time and budget for the less exciting but very important tasks like automated testing. The product launched and got great feedback from users, which then helped us to build out the backlog for multiple future phases.
I love this question. It can help you talk yourself up a bit more and serve as a great reminder of all the reasons you rock as a PM. Talking about a skillset you’re proud of can help to show off your great qualities. Your face will light up, you’ll remember to breathe, and your shoulders might even find their way down from your ears.
Make sure you have a couple of projects to talk about here, to cover off a range of different skills and enthusiasms. You might have been proud of it because there were a hundred other stakeholders desperate to have their voice heard. You handled them like a pro and kept them all happy. Or maybe the product itself was innovative and exciting, and you had a hand in that.
Heads up. You should also prepare for some specific skills-based questions like these:
- How would you handle a project going off track and over budget?
- Can you tell us how you approach prioritization?
- What do you look for in project management tools and software?
- What is your approach to dealing with conflict on your team?
Interviews aren’t one-way streets
We spend a lot of our time at work, so it’s essential to ensure that your prospective new company is a good fit for you. So ask yourself—what do you want to get out of this role, and what sort of company do you want to work for?
And then ask your prospective new employer. Ask them about their culture, their staff engagement and turnover rate, what their approach to diversity and inclusion looks like. You can usually get a sense pretty quickly of whether or not companies treat D&I as a tick box or if they’re going to actively recruit a diverse workforce and support that workforce to succeed.
There are also key questions you can ask to get a sense of the value they place on project management:
- How many projects is a PM typically responsible for? How long does a typical project run for?
- Find out the typical structure of a project team and its roles and responsibilities. For example, as PM, will you be making critical decisions about the tech stack or have tech leads on hand to advise?
- If there are both account and project managers, how do their dynamics work together?
- What does the handover process look like when new projects come in?
It might be that you’re applying for the first PM role they’ve ever recruited for, in which case they might not have the answers to these questions. Context is important!
Run away, fast: red flags to watch out for
🚩 There is a lack of diversity in the team and no plan to make changes
🚩 No clear career progression structure
🚩 No absolute clarity around team structures and dynamics
🚩 Obfuscation of the salary range
🚩 Describing things like paid time off and flexible working as “benefits” (these are legal requirements, thanks)
🚩 When they can’t describe their flexible working policy (core hours of 9-5 isn’t flexible)
🚩 High staff turnover—do people typically leave after a few months or a year?
🚩 When the posting describes a company environment as “fast-paced”. This can often be a euphemism for “too much work” and an expectation to work unpaid overtime regularly
Hopefully, these interview tips will help you bag your next job at a company that’s right for you. Good luck—you’ve got this.
