10 Project Manager Interview Questions Tested Answers You Need to Know

In this video, I'm going to explain you how to answer junior project manager interview questions. These questions are tricky, and you need to understand what an interviewing PM wants to hear from you. You need to get into his mind. Also, stay until the end, because I will share five simple tricks that you need to do before the interview starts. Let's do it. Hello, I'm Dmitry from Project Management Basics, and I help people just like you to become a project manager from any role you're currently at. So, if you want to become a PM, subscribe to this channel. So, the very first question is common and commonly misunderstood. Tell us a bit about yourself. Do you really think that an interviewing project manager wants to know your biography? Their answer is no, we don't want to hear about your biography, we have your CV. What we really need is some connection points to dig deeper to understand that you have skills, knowledge, and talents of a project manager, of a leader. Therefore, you need to treat this question as a teaser to a blockbuster. It's your way to highlight the major points of your previous experience that is related to the project management, not to your previous jobs. It is your opportunity to drive the interview in any direction that you want. So, for example, if you want to tell about the university you graduated from, tell it in such a way that shows that you have talents of a project manager. I graduated from this university and it was the first place where I've got my leadership experience. I did this and that. Or I worked for two years at this unrelated job and that's the place where I understood that I have great management skills. And here you tell some story about how you did something, how you improve the process, how you manage people, how you lead them. So whatever you want to say answering this question, it should be related to project management. It should show that you have skills in management, in leadership, in communication, and maybe a bit of administration as well. All right, if you have a tell us about your previous experience question, it means you did the poorest job answering the previous question because an interviewing PM was not able to make a connection point to dive deeper into any of your stories. So he still has nothing to talk about that relates to project management and leadership. All the same recommendations apply to this question as well. You need to provide something that an interviewing PM can use to start the actual interview. But again, you don't want that. You want to drive the interview into direction that you have prepared for. You need to prepare stories about your project management and leadership experience. Okay, no matter how good you were telling the stories about your previous experience and telling about yourself, sooner or later you'll come to a point where an interviewing PM will want to test your knowledge about actual project management theory. So the next commonly asked question is what are the main skills of a project manager? And here, if you rely heavily on textbooks and information on the internet, you'll tell something like planning or execution. But if you have some practical experience, you will for sure say that it's leadership and motivation. Why? Well, you need to understand that you as a project manager don't produce any direct results for a project. Yes, you organize people to do the work, but here's what you might not be aware of. You don't do project management on your own as well. To collect requirements, to do the estimations, to create the schedule, everything requires an input from the team. So project management is not free of charge. You don't do it solely by your own. And moreover, if you will try to do it, that's the sure way to fail a project. Even if you have the most unexperienced team that doesn't know how to do the project, you still want to get their input and their buy-in on the project plan because they will be doing it with their speed, with their performance. And you want a realistic project plan. That's why leadership and motivation are the most critical skills of a project manager. Therefore, answering this question, you want to start with leadership and motivation because you want to create a realistic project plan because you want to have a motivated team, you want to have engaged stakeholders who are feeling the ownership for the project success. Right after that, you may get a follow-up question. What makes you a great project manager? All right, I've got a hack for you here. So, to answer this question, you need to prepare in advance. Here's what you need to do. At the moment when the recruiters reach you, you need to ask several questions before the interview. First, ask about the project management approach in this company. Usually, recruiters don't tell you much about the actual specifics, but they can provide you some insights on how people manage projects from the perspective whether it's about management or leadership. And second, you want to ask what kind of project managers, what kind of leaders they want to see in the company. And that's your answer to that question. So, if you got prepared, you will use their own words to answer this question. Okay, if you didn't have an opportunity to ask the recruiter this question, your answer should be, again, in line with leadership and motivation. Moreover, you should point out that you had experience and you have great talents in leading people without authority or leading people without a title. If you can support that with a story from your previous unrelated experience, that will be a huge bonus for you. Next, we'll go into a practical level of questions. So, interviewing PM will surely ask you, do you know how to motivate people? Or do you know what motivates people? An average PM candidate will start talking about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Herberg's Theory, Expectancy Theory, and so on. If you want to nail this question, you should come up with the actionable, step-by-step plan to motivation and leadership with a new team. For sure, you want to say that you base your approach on those theories, plus maybe a book that you read on leadership and motivation. So, this way you can show that you understand what to do with the person that you just met a few days ago when you joined this project, and you already know what you will do to motivate and engage this person in a project. I've got lots of materials on this topic. See the link in the description. Again, there is a follow-up question here because there is conflict resolution, and they will ask you, do you know how to resolve conflicts? And here, you do want to show that you understand the basics of conflict resolution. You need to highlight two important aspects. First, as a project manager, you approach every conflict directly. You know that conflict in general is a good thing, but unresolved conflict can develop into something bad. Therefore, you don't try to avoid any conflicts. You don't try to smooth them out. You are ready to get into the conflict as a party or as a mediator and resolve it. You are ready to collaborate with conflicting parties to resolve this conflict and get the best possible solution, and in the process, make your team stronger. The second critical aspect is that you understand that the root cause of the problem is usually not something that people show you at the surface. It's not something that they tell you as the first thing during your conflict resolution efforts. Therefore, you understand that you need to dive deeper. You need to dig to the root cause of the problem, and it is usually in another dimension, and you need to fix the root cause of the problem so that the conflict do not reappear in the nearest future. All right, moving on. The next common question that junior project managers get during interview is how to create accurate estimates. From the basics of project management, you need to know that bottom-up estimates are the most accurate ones, but there are a lot of integrated parts and processes that are required to produce the bottom-up estimate. There is a whole chain of processes and tools that you need to describe, starting from requirements, traceability metrics, going into project scope statement, work breakdown structure, list of activities, and only then we are getting to the estimating part. So on the basic level, you need to say that to provide an accurate estimate, you need to identify 100% of project scope, and work breakdown structure helps here. And second, you need to estimate on the lowest level, usually it's tasks and activities. And by the way, you are doing the estimations of cost, duration, resources, well, everything on that lowest level. Again, there are in-depth articles on this topic in the description below, do check them. Nowadays, it's not uncommon that a project manager combines the role with an engineer, business analyst, or someone else. Therefore, do you have a technical or expert knowledge background is a common question on an interview, and you need to answer it correctly. So even if you have technical background, or if you're an expert and you're promoting to a project manager, here's what you need to say. I don't rely on my technical skills to lead the team. I use their input to create the project plan, to do all the major decisions, and I use my technical skills just for sanity checks. I understand that the project team will be doing the actual work, and I should not impact their decisions, their estimates, and so on. I can provide my input to them so they consider it, but I'm not enforcing it. If there is a real need to push my technical decisions, for sure, I will get the buy-in from the team first by using the leadership skills and soft skills that I have. Okay, and if you don't have any technical background or expert knowledge, your answer is the same. I don't rely on technical skills and knowledge to lead and motivate people to manage the project. My overall approach is to leverage the skills and knowledge of the project team. They are the subject matter experts. I, as a project manager, work on a higher level with estimates, with the costs, with the tasks, and gun charts. Moreover, I leverage the subject matter experts outside the team to make sanity checks on the technical decisions and the estimates of the team. That would be a perfect answer. Okay, this set of questions can be asked differently. Who is responsible for? Who bears the responsibility? What will you do if someone fucked up? Here's the general rule for you. Whenever you hear the word responsibility, you need to make a mental note. A project manager is responsible for everything on a project. A project manager bears the ultimate responsibility for everything. A project manager is responsible for delays on a project, even there are objective reasons like sick leaves, unexpected weather, or whatever else. A project manager is responsible for unhappy clients, even if they push a lot of change requests into the project. It's your responsibility to deliver value to the clients in time and within budget. It's your responsibility to keep the team motivated and stakeholders engaged, no matter what. Likewise, there might be a question. Who's responsible for a case when there is an active sabotage of your work from inside the team or from the outside? Again, the answer is the same. A project manager is responsible. You should have planned the project, taking into account all the possible risks, all the possible aspects. Keep in mind that if you will lay blame on someone on an interview, that's a no-go. It's an instant reason to reject you. No one wants project managers and leaders who lay blame on others. They want you to bear the ultimate responsibility. Okay, last but not least, the main question of the interview. Do you have any questions to ask? Hell yes, I've got a lot of questions for you. I've got a whole list of questions. And actually, I recommend you to have this list of questions for the interview on your phone. Drag out your phone, open the app, and start asking them one by one. Show that you came prepared. Okay, what kind of questions you should ask on an interview? Again, the kind of questions that will show you that you understand what a project management is and what a project manager does. So the general questions that you want to start with are, what is the project management approach in the company? How many people will be there in my team? What is the hierarchy of leadership in the company? To whom will I report inside this company? Once you get the understanding of the company and how it works, you need to ask about your first months as a project manager in this company. Ask if there is onboarding program and whether they will teach you and train you on the ways of project management in this company. As you are an entry-level project manager, you want to ask whether there will be a senior project manager or project management mentor who will support you during the initial period. Next, you want to be very clear about their expectations towards you. What do you expect me to do and achieve during the first three months of the work? And more importantly, what should I do and achieve to pass the trial period successfully? Here, you may need to do some negotiations because you need to ensure that these goals, these requirements to pass the trial period are measurable. They are objective and you will be able to prove that you achieved what they want. There is one special question that you need to ask. It sounds like this. You ask me about something and why it's important. You need to select a topic that you were not able to answer correctly or you were not able to answer at all. Now you want them to answer this question for many reasons. First, you may need the same answer on another interview. Second, if this question wasn't that important and it was a theoretical one, by asking about it in such a way will reduce the negative impact of your inability to answer it correctly. Okay, before we move on, if you have other interview questions that you want me to answer, write them in the comments below. I will try to answer as much as I can. Okay, now let's talk about five tricks that you need to do before an interview starts. Okay, first of all, you need to use firm handshake with each participant of this interview, even with women. Do some training beforehand. During the handshake, you need to look into the eyes of a person and you need to smile. You have only five seconds to make good first impression and it's very difficult to change that impression to something else. Then you need to keep the confident posture all the time while you are sitting on the interview. Third, you need to keep your hands above the table. Interviewers should always see them. And again, keep in mind that you need to have a relaxed and confident posture. Fourth, maintain the eye contact while you are speaking with the interviewers. Fifth, use your hands and gestures to enhance what you are talking about. Like, we started here, ended here. It was five of us in the team. And so on. All these tricks work on a subconscious level. Keep in mind that these interviewers treat you like a stranger. You want to make them feel comfortable with you. Even if you're an entry-level project manager, they still feel uncomfortable with a stranger. If you like this video and you want to become a project manager, subscribe to this channel and turn on the notifications. Do check the additional materials in the description. See you soon.