How to Interview Your Interviewers

Are you interviewing for jobs and feeling unsure which offer to take? Have you heard about making sure YOU also interview THEM while they interview you, but not sure how to do that? We have a simple solution for objectively rating your interviews that will help you decide whether or not to take the job!

Step 1: Identifying values that are important to you in a job before the interview

Knowing if a place is right for you can be tough. But if you know what your most important values are for working somewhere, you can decide easily if you should take the job. When I was looking at internships, I realized that I really enjoyed working with a team in the past. So, one of my top values for interviewing was teamwork. Figuring out your values has a lot to do with defining what success means to you. Come up with 4-6 values that are really important to you when thinking about your ideal job. Here are the values I came up with when interviewing for my internship:

Step 2: Make a list to prioritize each value that you will discuss in the interview

Once you have your 4-6 values, decide if they are all equally important. Make a list, with the first spot being for the most important value, and last spot for the least important. This step can be hard because of course you value each of these things! And it’s OK to have some or all of your values be equally important-- trust your gut! If values are equally important, write them down side by side instead of before and after each other. These values are the topics you will ask about in the interview.

My list for internship looked like this:

Step 3: Assign a numerical value to each of the items on your list for the interview

Now that you have your list, this step should be pretty easy. Your most important value should have the highest numerical value, while the second most important value should have a slightly lower numerical value, and so on. You’re going to have to follow your intuition again here to decide how much larger one numerical value should be compared to another. Here is how mine looked after assigning numbers to each of my values:

Step 4: Find the highest possible score for the perfect interview

You have numbers assigned to each of your values, so now it’s time to add them all up. The sum of all of them together will be the overall score you will rate interviews on. Here is what my list looked like once I had added up each value:

Step 5: Each numerical value is now a scale for that value in your interview

You now have a number assigned to each of your values. When you interview, you will rate your interviews using this number. For example, I gave “teamwork” a numerical value of 5. So I rated each of my interview sites on teamwork on a scale between 0-5. My “location/environment” value had a score of 2. So I rated each of my interview sites on the location and environment with a scale from 0-2. Use the same scaling convention for each of your values. Here is what mine looked like after this step:

Step 6: Rate your interviews using this system

It’s time for the big day-- interviewing! Taking notes during the interview will help you immensely, so definitely make sure you’re writing down anything that might impact your ratings after the interview is over. Immediately after the interview, even before emailing your thank you note, go through each of your values and rate the job using your scales. Add up each of these, and then divide it by your total sum from step #4. Use a calculator and divide the score by your total sum, and you now have a number that tells you how good of a fit this job is. Below is an example of one interview I had, and the math I did to determine how good of a fit it was for me:

Step 7: Compare scores of different interviews to each other

Hooray! You made it to the final step! This one is super simple-- you just compare the scores among the places you interviewed. You might even want to make a spreadsheet so you can keep track of everything. Here is an example below-- I erased a lot of info from it for the purpose of this image, but you should definitely include the names of the places you’ve interviewed at on your spreadsheet.

That’s it! You’re done! You have successfully identified what is important to you in a job, and rated each place you interviewed at accordingly. You have done what is so important but often forgotten: YOU interview THEM-- not just they interview you.

I hope this technique helps you in the future to decide what job to take! If you have any other ideas, please comment below. And share this post with anyone who is trying to find a job right now!