12 Common Job Interview Questions

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› What do you know about our company?

Or, are you a consumer of our product?

The employer hopes to learn:

Did you prepare for this interview? Did you do your homework?

Be ready to offer specifics.

› Why should we consider you for this position?

Or, why do you think you are a good fit for this position?

The employer hopes to learn:

Are you confident in your abilities? What does the company gain by hiring you?

› What are your strengths and weaknesses?

The employer hopes to learn:

Companies expect honesty in answering this question. You should be able to articulate what you are best at and areas you are working to improve.

› What do you want to be doing 5 years from now?

The employer hopes to learn:

Are you goal-directed? Or will you be satisfied with an entry-level position?

› What other job experiences have you had?

The employer hopes to learn:

Have you held a job before? How long have you been working? Did you get along with others?

› What people have been important influences in your life?

The employer hopes to learn:

People who are quick to credit others often work well with others and are not driven by ego. 

› Are you a self-starter?

The employer hopes to learn:

Can you work alone and without direct supervision? If you're not given a task, are you the type of person who takes the initiative to find something to do?

› What are your interests apart from work?

Or, what’s special about you? What do you bring to the job that will help you succeed?

The employer hopes to learn..

Hobbies, activities and other interests indicate that people are well-rounded and can manage their time and work. It’s an opportunity to sell yourself.

› Tell me about a problem you solved recently.

The employer hopes to learn:

Insight into your problem-solving skills.

› Tell me about a goal you recently achieved. What did your initial plan look like? What worked particularly well?

The employer hopes to learn:

Can you talk in detail about a goal you have achieved—where you created your own plan and not only followed those plans but also adapted to circumstances and changing conditions.  

› Tell me about a goal you failed to achieve.

The employer hopes to learn:

If you take responsibility for failing without blaming other people or outside factors. Can you admit you were wrong and that you are willing to change your mind? This will also indicate whether you learned from your experience: can you describe in detail what perspectives, skills, and expertise you gained from that training?   

› How do you handle stress?

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27 Freelancing Sites

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21 Freelancing Articles

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6 ways to find fresh story ideas — and where to sell them - Health Journalism

7 tools and tips for getting — and staying — organized as a freelancer - Health Journalism

14 Ways To Get Paid To Write As A Side Hustle - The College Invester

Chelsea’s Guide To Freelancing - Chelsea Cirruzzo, a reporter with U.S. News & World Report

Freelancing with ADHD: How to embrace your strengths and manage the challenges - Health Journalism

Here's what a bunch of publications pay freelancers - Freelancing with Tim

How AI is transforming freelance journalism - Harvards Nieman Lab

How to ask for more money — and actually get it - Freelancing with Tim

How to become a Freelance Writer (A Guide) - MSN

How to price your work as a freelancer - WePresent

How to Succeed as a Freelance Investigative Journalist - GIJIN

I've been a successful freelancer for 10 years. I still feel like I should always be chasing my next opportunity. - Business Insider

A Journalist’s guide to freelancing - Julie Patel blog

Learning how to thrive as a freelance journalist - Response Source

New market guides for pitching to Good Housekeeping, Big Think and New York Post - Health Journalism

A Quick guide to finding your freelance niche - Freelancers Union

Should freelance journalists get an LLC? - Health Journalism

This writer wants to prevent freelancers from floundering on story pitches - Poynter

Tips for pitching the New York Times, Wired and Consumer Reports - Health Journalism

What Freelancers Need to Know About Income, Deductions, and Taxes - Bloomberg

Why your timing matters when pitching to journalists - PA Media

20 Articles about Cover Letters & Personal Statements

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43 Articles on Career Advice

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5 skills young professionals should master - Glassdoor

5 Ways to Demonstrate Your Value — Remotely - HBR

Actionable Advice For Young People Starting Out Their Careers - Forbes

The best way to show off your emerging A.I. skills to land a job - CNBC

Building Your Intellectual Toolbox: Career Advice from the Experts - Council on Foreign Relations

The Career Advice No One Teaches High Achievers - Inc

Common misconceptions about MBAs - ZDnet

Don’t Focus on Your Job at the Expense of Your Career - Harvard Business Review

Don’t Just Pay Interns, Help Them Build Networks - Harvard Business Review

Essential advice for landing your dream job - Fast Company

Find Work You Love by Identifying Your Unique Angle - LifeHacker

Gen Z is Hungry for Career Advice. But Their Parents Are Lost Themselves - TIME

Giving Career Advice to Kids Has Never Been Harder - Wall Street Journal

Google’s ‘Career Dreamer’ uses AI to help you explore job possibilities – Tech Crunch

Harvard researcher shares key skill of the future—that most people don't have - CNBC

How do you launch a journalism career in the middle of a pandemic? - Poynter

How to Break Up With Your Career - Wall Street Journal

How Much Time Can I Take Off Between Jobs? - Harvard Business Review

How to get your career moving: lessons from a behavioural scientist - Financial Times

How to Improve Your Career Development - US News

How to Recover from a Toxic Job - Harvard Business Review

How to Tell You're About to be Laid Off - Life Hacker

How to Vet a Remote Workplace - Harvard Business Review

The Journalists of Color Resource Guide

Journalism Mentors

Journalist Guide to Survival: Five ways to thrive on your first job - RTDNA

LinkedIn CEO: Ignore this common piece of career advice—it’s ‘outdated’ and ‘a little bit foolish’ - CNBC

Losing Passion for Your Job? Why Quitting Might Be the Right Move - Harvard Business School

One Piece of Career Advice Changed Everything - Inc

Our Top 6 Pieces of Career Wisdom for Recent Grads - First Round

The Personal Business of Being Laid Off - HazLitt

Pros and Cons of Working From Home - US News

How to Recover from a Toxic Job - Harvard Business Review

The Secret to Retaining the Best Employees: Ask Them These Four Questions - Wall Street Journal

A Survival Guide for Dealing With a Bad Boss - Wall Street Journal

These are the signs that you're in a toxic work environment - CNN

The top 10 skills you need to land a job right now, according to LinkedIn - CNBC

These 5 skills are AI-proof and likely to become more valuable ‘over the next 5 years,’ says Oxford-trained career expert - CNBC

Tips for Using AI Tools in Technical Interviews - IEEE

Well-meaning advice to new grads often makes the job search more stressful—what actually helps: Harvard psychologist - CNBC

What Reporters Should Do Before and After a Layoff - Education Writer’s Association

What’s a good (and bad) way to leave your job? - FT

Your Career Is Just One-Eighth of Your Life - The Atlantic

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11 Apps for Job Hunting

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Career Builder - online hiring app that allows job seekers to access tools that will help them at every point in the process.

ExpressJob - mapping that shows nearby jobs and makes applying easy with one-click applications but also offers ways to stay organized once you are hired (timesheets, schedule, etc.)

Glassdoor - search engine platform offering job openings along with company reviews.

Indeed - sort through the search engine database and stay on top of openings that interest you. 

Linkedin - the social network for professionals.

Linkup - focuses on little-known job listings. Free, iOS only. 

MeeBoss - A chat-first job matching platform.

Monster - brings jobs from other job searchers into a single app.

Snagjob - only hourly jobs. Free.

Strawberry.me - Matches individuals with professional personal and career coaches.

ZipRecruiter - offers more than 100 job boards with filters. Sends notifications about vacancies.\

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Standalone AI Literacy

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The returns on standalone AI literacy without domain depth are heading to zero. What the economy will actually reward is deep domain expertise with AI embedded in industrial context. A financial analyst building AI-driven models needs to understand finance first. A biotech researcher using AI for drug discovery needs to understand biology first. The hard skills underneath the AI layer, mathematical reasoning, scientific literacy, domain knowledge, take years to develop and will hold their value. -Sofia Fenichell

A Painting not a Ladder

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When you look at a painting from a distance, you see a larger, cohesive picture. But as you approach the canvas, you see that there are, in fact, hundreds of separate strokes that make up that picture. Think about your career as a work of art — expansive, independent movements that incrementally reveal a whole.

When we visualize a career ladder, we start putting ourselves in a box. Step back and see the painting — every experience adds a brushstroke to a bigger picture. 

Zainab Ghadiyali quoted in a FirstRound article 

Managing Your Professional Decline

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The shelves are packed with titles like The Science of Getting Rich and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. There is no section marked “Managing Your Professional Decline.”  But some people have managed their declines well.   

At some point, writing one more book will not add to my life satisfaction; it will merely stave off the end of my book-writing career. The canvas of my life will have another brushstroke that, if I am being forthright, others will barely notice, and will certainly not appreciate very much. The same will be true for most other markers of my success.  What I need to do, in effect, is stop seeing my life as a canvas to fill, and start seeing it more as a block of marble to chip away at and shape something out of.

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

Be Prepared to Walk Away

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Your foot is on the gas, professionally. Living by your wits—by your fluid intelligence—you seek the material rewards of success, you attain a lot of them, and you are deeply attached to them. You should be prepared to walk away from these rewards before you feel ready. Even if you’re at the height of your professional prestige, you probably need to scale back your career ambitions in order to scale up your metaphysical ones. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

The Impact of AI on Computer Science Degrees

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Computer science has consistently been one of the top majors in the United States for the last decade. But with the ability to task A.I. to code, startups and tech giants alike are hiring fewer and fewer entry-level computer scientists. Reports suggest that at major A.I. companies, the hiring rate for software engineering jobs has fallen over the course of 2024 from a high of about 3,000 per month to near zero. If enrollments in computer science degrees dry up as jobs disappear, the whole pipeline from education to employment could crash.  It’s not so surprising that chatbots might threaten technical jobs before writing ones. -Leif Weatherby, director of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University, writing in the New York Times

Straight A’s won’t matter in real life

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When I was in college, I obsessed over getting straight A’s, said Adam Grant. Now that I’m a professor, “I watch in dismay” when I see students joining the same “cult of perfectionism.” They think straight A’s will provide entrée to elite graduate schools and prestigious careers. The evidence, however, says otherwise. Research across industries shows that while there’s a modest correlation between grades and job performance the first year out of college, after a few years, the difference is “trivial.” Why? “Getting straight A’s requires conformity. Having an influential career demands originality.” While straight-A students are locked in their dorm rooms or library pursuing “meaningless perfection,” their peers are developing skills that aren’t captured by grades: “creativity, leadership, and teamwork skills and social, emotional, and political intelligence.” Real career success doesn’t come from “finding the right solution to a problem—it’s more about finding the right problem to solve.” In high school Steve Jobs pulled a 2.65 GPA, J.K. Rowling had a C average at Exeter, and Martin Luther King Jr. managed only one A in four years at Morehouse College. This tells us that “underachieving in school can prepare you to overachieve in life.”

Adam Grant writing in The New York Times (as quoted in The Week Magazine) 

Approaching AI in Your Career

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Other than mastering AI, I suggest leaning into the parts of your job that involve your physical presence and human relationships and away from the parts that involve analysis of large datasets or bodies of text. While you’re using these news tools — figuring out what machines can do and what you can do that they can’t — you should stop to enjoy the new functions, rather than simply assessing the threat.  -Megan McArdle writing in the Washington Post

It’s All in the Attitude

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Several years ago on an extremely hot day, a crew of men were working on the road bed of the railroad when they were interrupted by a slow moving train. The train ground to a stop and a window in the last car – which incidentally was custom make and air conditioned – was raised. A booming, friendly voice called out, “Dave, is that you?” Dave Anderson, the crew chief called back, “Sure is, Jim, and it’s really good to see you.” With that pleasant exchange, Dave Anderson was invited to join Jim Murphy, the president of the railroad, for a visit. For over an hour the men exchanged pleasantries and then shook hands warmly as the train pulled out.

Dave Anderson’s crew immediately surrounded him and to a man expressed astonishment that he knew Jim Murphy, the president of the railroad as a personal friend. Dave then explained that over 20 years earlier he and Jim Murphy had started to work for the railroad on the same day. One of the men, half-jokingly and half seriously asked Dave why he was still working out in the hot sun and Jim Murphy had gotten to be president. Rather wistfully, Dave explained, “twenty-three years ago I went to work for $1.75 an hour and Jim Murphy went to work for the railroad.”

Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top

Should Students Choose Higher-Paying Majors?

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Pushing students from science into the humanities tended to decrease their later-life wages — that’s finding is not surprising. But the converse also appeared to be true: Pushing students from the humanities into science also tended to, if anything, decrease their wages. While there are certain very high-paying majors (like engineering, economics, and computer science) that increase students’ earning potential even if they would prefer to study something else, helping students to study their most-preferred major generally seems to provide long-run financial benefits even in the humanities.

Students should know that when it comes to choosing a college degree, small differences in average-wage-by-major statistics shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Especially when the average wage differences between majors are not very big, students should put their own strengths first and not let the statistics cloud their understanding of their own interests.

Zachary Bleemer writing in the The Chronicle of Higher Ed

Job Hopping

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In 2014, I reported on a new paper about young workers who regularly quit their jobs and ended up better for it. “People who switch jobs more frequently early in their careers tend to have higher wages and incomes in their prime-working years,” one of the co-authors, the economics professor Henry Siu, told me. “Job-hopping is actually correlated with higher incomes, because people have found better matches.”  

Last year, the benefits of role-switching crystallized when I read a paper by the Northwestern University economist Dashun Wang. In a deep analysis of the careers of scientists and artists, he found that their “hot streaks” tended to be periods of focused and narrow work following a spell of broader experimentation. This is sometimes called the “explore-exploit” sequence. The idea is that many successful people are like good oil scouts: They spend a lot of time searching for their space, and then they drill deep when they find the right niche.

Role-switching is important not because quitting is so wonderful, but rather because sampling from different skills and fields is helpful, provided that you’re prepared to pounce on an area that clicks for you.

Derek Thompson writing in The Atlantic

Don’t do the job that you want to tell other people you do

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Work is not a series of words on a LinkedIn profile. It’s a series of moments in the world. And if you don’t enjoy those moments, no sequence of honorifics will dispel your misery. 

Some people take jobs with long commutes not fully considering what it will do to their health. Or they take jobs that require lots of travel not fully intuiting what it will mean for their family life. Or they’ll take horribly difficult jobs for money they don’t need, or take high-status jobs for a dopamine rush with a half-life of about three days. If you want to be smarter about your beingness in time, either you can read a lot of impenetrable philosophy or you can listen to Jim. Don’t take the job you want to talk about at parties for a couple of minutes a month. Take the job you want to do for hundreds of hours a year.

Derek Thompson writing in The Atlantic

Formatting your Resume

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Formats for Resumes:

1. Chronological
Possible Headings: Experience, Education, Activities and Skills (computer, language),

2. Functional or Skills
Possible Headings: Experience, Education, Skills (computer, language),

Professionnal experience

  • A resume should begin with the job candidate’s experience in the field in which they are applying, especially jobs, internships or work for student media or the college rather than the candidate’s education.

  • All experience that reflects the career goals, whether paid or unpaid.

  • Internships and assigned responsibilities.

  • Paid volunteer positions that reflect interests and skills, especially when it included a title.

Education

  • GPA if 3.5 or above

  • Coursework and papers can be highlighted as a special subsection under “Education.” For instance, one candidate was helped getting a position at CNN by taking Media Ethics and Media Law. For formal academic papers related to the field, include a one-sentence description of the length, focus, and scope of the paper or project. For instance, “Analyzed and compared journalistic styles in the Washington Post, Washingtonian magazine and Washington Business Journal.”

  • Awards and scholarships including the Dean’s List, etc.

  • If your education was self-financed or you paid a large percentage of your college expenses.

  • Conferences or special meetings you've attended having to do with the area of the job for which you are applying.

  • If you worked while attending college.

International Experience

International experience, including semesters abroad and other significant travel. Living in another country or having spent time overseas, shows a broad range of life history, the ability to adapt and experience with diverse groups.

Skills

A list of computer programs you are proficient using that are not assumed. For instance, an ability to use Microsoft Word or Google Docs would be assumed but not experience with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Activities (or interests)

If you have any odd skills or abilities, you might consider adding them under "interests" or a similar title. For instance, winning a chess tournament. While it might not directly relate to the job, including it suggests the candidate is smart, has diverse interests and self-displiined.

References

The cliché "references available upon request" is not worth including. If they want references, they will ask. Just be ready to present them. Including a list of references will take up vital real estate on resume, especially when it's just one page. Besides, when you are asked for references, it's an alert that you are truly being considered in the final batch for hire. Otherwise, you might not know that you are under serious consideration or a finalist.

If you decide to include references, make a courtesy call and ask each person for permission to use them as a reference. Tell them who might be calling and which of your skills you’d like them to emphasize. Include their relationship to you, such as “former supervisor.” It’s good to have a letter of recommendation on file in case you are asked by prospective employers to provide them on short notice.

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