PROJECT MANAGER Interview Questions & ANSWERS! (How to PASS a Project Management Job Interview!)
Project Manager Interview Questions on Clear Communication
One of the essential skills for project managers is communication. Without this, everything else fails. Communication is the life and blood of any project. It is claimed at PMI® Research Conference that about 90 percent of a project managerâs time is spent communicating. In todays siloed organizations, communication happens between various groups and levels, including internal as well as external groups of stakeholders. Here are two communication-related questions asked to candidates:
3. What is your strategy for prioritizing the tasks?
Regardless of its size and scope, prioritization is a critical concept that determines the success of the project and the timely completion of it. If your interviewer asks questions on prioritization, your answer should include how you distinguish between urgency and importance. You can say how you determine what is crucial and leave behind what is unnecessary. This project management interview question is also to test how flexible and adaptable you are while managing a project. Your answer should describe that you know when to say no during the project.Â
3. Describe Your Communication Style
A project manager must be an effective communicator to be successful. There are always challenges when speaking to stakeholders, vendors, customers, and team members.
Each type of team member needs to be communicated with a little differently.
A good project manager will know how to strike the right balance between different team members and smooth over any issues that pop up.
A project manager without good communication skills is probably one to avoid.
5. Tell us about the most challenging projects you have managed so far? What were the steps you have taken to tackle the challenges?
Here, the interview panel wants to know how you respond to critical challenges and deal with conflicting situations in a project. It would be best if you did not refer to examples where you had to manage tough team members or lack of support from management. As a project manager, you should be smart enough to handle such occurrences. Instead, focus on external factors like a situation where the project was unexpectedly called off, or funding was reduced in the middle of an extensive project. Also, you should explain how you tackled the challenges and managed the team during tough situations.Â
45. How do you set goals for your team? And how do you track these goals?
Whether itâs deadline goals or overall project goals, setting goals is an important part of being a project manager, as it motivates team members and helps to keep projects on track. Be sure to give specific examples that demonstrate how youâve set goals for your team in the past and how youâve tracked these goals. For instance, you might have set a project completion goal for a specific project that required everyone to complete their part by a certain date. Perhaps you regularly checked in with team members to see if any obstacles could stop them from meeting that deadline and if so, you offered possible solutions.
