Prior Experience Questions

Introduction #

Prior experience questions are intended to prompt you into sharing examples from your life. The idea behind these questions is that your past experiences are predictors of future behavior. As you answer these questions, interviewers are listening to understand your instincts and influences.

Your life as your CV #

The advantage for you (the candidate) is that this is a time to tell stories about you. In other words, you already know the answers to these questions.

Notice that we said you will be sharing examples from your life and not necessarily from previous work experiences. Most often, your examples should be from previous work experiences, but if you are new to your career or new to the industry, you may not have work experiences to share. In that case, you will be preparing examples from all aspects of your life.

Even if you are an experienced professional, you may choose an example from a volunteer experience or your personal life that demonstrates who you are.

Pro Tip: Make sure that everything you say in a response is relevant to the response. Everything that you mention should come back around, if it doesn’t, then it should not be included. For example, think of a recipe in a cookbook. The “ingredient” section only lists things that will be used to make the dish - nothing more, nothing less. Do the same for your answers.