Hypothetical Interviews
The interviewer may ask you hypothetical questions designed to find out how you would handle a work situation. For example:

In a real on-the-job situation, you would obviously have more information at hand--or you would be asking more questions. In this situation, you might ask a few questions, then set forth a few reasonable assumptions, which the interviewer may then tailor to what he or she had in mind. This way, you won't find yourself in the deep end of the pool, burdened with a conception that's very different from what the manager had in mind.
By asking questions and having a dialogue about the assignment, you are also showing the interviewer that you think before you jump into an assignment.

Your next task is to describe, step-by-step, what approach you might take. Then you can add that in a real-life situation you would, of course, look into previous efforts to deal with the same issue, consult with others, and consider other approaches, as appropriate.

One way to prepare for hypothetical questions is to pretend that you are the interviewer. What hypothetical questions would you ask? And what would you be looking for in an answer? What the interviewer is seeking in an answer is usually not the conclusion someone else might have come to after a month's analysis and contemplation, but a clear and sensible thought process.

Psychological Interviews
The term "psychological interviewing" strikes fear in the hearts of most people, but if it is done professionally and competently, it need not do so. In responsible hands, the purpose of a psychological interview is to determine whether you are one of the 90 percent of people who are honest and try to do their work well—or if you're someone who might terrorize the office, steal from your employer, or file fraudulent legal claims. A secondary goal, if you are in the 90 percent majority, might be to identify what type of assignment and management style to you would respond to best.

Most of the questions are likely to focus on your aspirations and your family background, with an effort to find a linkage between the two. Others may deal with topics such as what provides you the greatest satisfaction, what you would like to avoid, and past experiences that you enjoyed or didn't enjoy.

The most important thing to remember if you are to be interviewed by a professional psychologist is to be yourself (you don't want to look like you have something to hide). The second most important thing is not to overly dramatize your family background. If you have 14 siblings, just say you grew up in a large family, unless you're probed further. If you had an abusive parent, focus on the other parent. Don't give the psychologist a lot to feed on in terms of difficulties in your relationships with your family.

In responding to work-related questions, use the types of answers recommended for other forms of interviewing. You want to be as proud and confident as you are in your other interviews. And avoid deception, inconsistencies, nervousness, or anxiety in your answers. You don't want to be one of the ten percent labeled untrustworthy.

Unfortunately, a few unqualified interviewers may try to play the psychologist role, coming up with such odd ball questions as "If you were a tree, what kind would it be?" or "Picture yourself as a championship athlete. What sport and what position would you play?"

Give a boring but unchallengeable response. To the first question, oak (stable), maple (well liked), and redwood (long lasting) are great answers. To the second, basketball, tennis, baseball, and golf are fine. Running marathons is a bit iconoclastic, and rugby or ice hockey might suggest latent aggressiveness.

Behavioral Interviews
Companies have increasingly adopted behavioral interviewing techniques as a key technique in screening candidates. What is a behavioral interview? Basically, it's an interview designed to elicit information that will tell the interviewer how you will perform on the job. The principle behind the technique is the belief that the best indicator of future behavior is past behavior. The technique involves asking a series of questions designed to get the candidate to talk about how he or she handled certain situations in the past. For example, if a company has a high-stress environment, the interviewer might ask a candidate to talk about whether she has ever been in a stressful situation in the past. If she says yes, the interviewer would proceed with a line of questions about what she had done in the situation, how it made her feel, how others had responded to her actions, how she relieved the stress of the situation, and so on.
Typically, the interviewer will have determined three or four behavioral characteristics that would be most important for on-the-job success and will have written out a definition of each such characteristic. Examples:

In a behavioral interview, you will be provided with such definitions of desirable characteristics and asked for examples of situations in which you have exhibited those characteristics. Sometimes, after you have provided one example, you will be asked for another, just to test the depth of your experience.

One of the supposed benefits of this technique for employers is that candidates cannot prepare for these questions in advance. However, you can help yourself by anticipating the types of questions you might receive and dredging your memory for examples of past behavior. You may be able to guess at some of the questions by analyzing the job requirements beforehand. Behavioral interviewing is a challenge, but preparation will help. You may feel that you didn't have perfect answers to each question, yet still be seen as much better suited than the other candidates who didn't anticipate behavioral questions. As one swimmer said to the other upon the sighting a shark: "Fortunately, I don't have to swim faster than the shark. I only have to swim faster than you."