In Short · Reading time: 11 minutes
- Good interview questions and answers follow one pattern: answer the question in the first sentence, back it with one concrete example, and stop.
- Twelve questions come up in almost every interview; each one below has a weak answer, a strong answer and the reason the strong one works.
- In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, expect practical questions on notice period, salary and German level, and know which questions an interviewer may not ask.
Contents
- What Do Interviewers Want to Hear in Your Answers?
- How Do Interviewers Judge an Answer?
- Twelve Interview Questions and Answers, With Model Answers
- Which Questions Come Up in Almost Every DACH Interview?
- What May an Interviewer in Germany Not Ask?
- Why Reading Model Answers Is Not Enough
- Your 6-Step Plan to Prepare Your Answers
- FAQ
- Bottom Line
You know the questions. The interviewer knows you know them.
What decides the interview is not which question comes, but what you do in the first ten seconds of your answer.
What Do Interviewers Want to Hear in Your Answers?
Interviewers want an answer that responds to the question in the first sentence and proves it with one example from your own work. Most common interview questions are not trick questions. They are invitations to show evidence: what you did, how you decided and what came out of it.
Structured interviews make this explicit. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management describes behavioural questions as a way to learn how a candidate acted in past situations, because past behaviour is used to estimate future behaviour. A large re-analysis of selection research by Sackett and colleagues (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2022) ranked structured interviews among the strongest predictors of job performance.
An interview answer is not a speech. It is a claim with one piece of evidence.
The practical consequence: prepare stories, not sentences. Five or six well-chosen examples from your work can answer most of the questions below.
How Do Interviewers Judge an Answer?
Interviewers judge an answer on four things: whether it answers the question, how it is structured, what evidence it gives and whether you show your own part. You can use the same four criteria to check your own answers before the interview.
| Criterion | Weak answer | Strong answer |
|---|---|---|
| Relevance | Drifts to a topic you prefer | Answers the exact question in the first sentence |
| Structure | Chronological, no point | Point first, then example, then result |
| Evidence | Adjectives: "motivated", "a team player" | One situation, your action, a result someone could check |
| Ownership | "We did …" throughout | "We" for the goal, "I" for your decisions and actions |
Length matters too. Most answers work best at one to two minutes. If you are still talking after three, the interviewer has usually stopped listening for content.
Twelve Interview Questions and Answers, With Model Answers
These twelve interview questions and answers cover what most first and second interviews ask, from "Tell me about yourself" to "Do you have any questions for us?". All model answers are illustrative, not real candidates. Replace every [bracket] with your own facts; an answer you cannot back up in a follow-up question is worse than a modest one.
1. "Tell me about yourself."
Answer "Tell me about yourself" with your present role, one relevant past result and why this job is the next step.
- Weak: "I was born in Izmir, studied in Ankara, then worked at three companies …"
- Strong: "I'm a [backend developer] at [a payments company], where I [own the service that handles refunds]. Last year I [cut its error rate by moving it to a queue-based design]. I'm applying because your team is [building the same kind of system at a larger scale]."
Why it works: present, past, future, in under a minute.
2. "Why do you want to work here?"
Answer "Why do you want to work here?" with one specific fact about the employer and how it connects to your experience.
- Weak: "You are a leading company with a great culture."
- Strong: "I read about [your move to a single platform for all regional shops]. I did [a similar migration at my last job], and I'd like to do it where the scale is [ten times larger]."
3. "Why are you leaving your current job?"
Answer "Why are you leaving?" by naming what you are moving towards, never by criticising your employer.
- Weak: "My manager doesn't value my work."
- Strong: "I've learned a lot in [four years], but the role has stopped growing. I want [more responsibility for architecture decisions], and this position offers exactly that."
4. "What is your greatest strength?"
Answer "What is your greatest strength?" with one strength that matters for this job and one example that proves it.
- Weak: "I'm a hard worker and a perfectionist."
- Strong: "I'm good at making complex topics simple. At [my last job] I [rewrote our onboarding guide], and [new colleagues needed noticeably fewer questions in their first month, according to their team lead]."
5. "What is your greatest weakness?"
Answer "What is your greatest weakness?" with a real but manageable weakness and the system you use to keep it in check.
- Weak: "I work too much."
- Strong: "I used to say yes to every request, and my own priorities slipped. Now I [block two focus mornings a week and agree priorities with my manager every Monday]."
6. "Tell me about a conflict with a colleague."
Answer a conflict question with the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result), with the focus on what you did to solve it.
- Weak: "We had a disagreement, but we worked it out."
- Strong: "[A product manager] wanted to ship a feature before testing was finished (situation). I was responsible for release quality (task). I [listed the three open risks, proposed shipping to five per cent of users first] and asked for a decision by the end of the day (action). We shipped in stages, [found one bug in the first group] and fixed it before the full release (result)."
7. "Tell me about a time you failed."
Answer a failure question with a real mistake, your share of it and what you changed afterwards.
- Weak: "I can't think of a real failure."
- Strong: "I [underestimated a data migration by two weeks] because I didn't test it with real data. I told the team as soon as I saw it, [split the work into two releases] and now [test every migration on a copy of production data first]."
8. "Why should we hire you?"
Answer "Why should we hire you?" by matching two or three requirements from the job ad to evidence from your experience.
- Weak: "Because I really want this job."
- Strong: "You need [someone who can run payment integrations and work with external partners]. I've [integrated three payment providers] and [was the contact person for two of them]. I can start contributing in the first weeks."
9. "Where do you see yourself in five years?"
Answer "Where do you see yourself in five years?" with a direction that fits the role, not a job title at another company.
- Weak: "In your position."
- Strong: "I'd like to be the person the team goes to for [system design], and to [mentor one or two junior developers]. This role is the right step towards that."
10. "What are your salary expectations?"
Answer the salary question with a researched range, and in Germany state it as gross per year.
- Weak: "Whatever you think is fair."
- Strong: "For this role in [Munich] I'm looking at [€62,000 to €68,000] gross per year, depending on the overall package."
Research before the interview. The Federal Employment Agency's Entgeltatlas shows median gross pay by occupation in Germany.
11. "When can you start?"
Answer "When can you start?" with a concrete date based on your notice period.
- Weak: "As soon as possible."
- Strong: "My notice period is [three months] to the end of a month, so I could start on [1 February]."
In Germany, if the contract says nothing else, an employee's notice is four weeks to the 15th or the end of a calendar month (BGB §622). Check your own contract first; it is often longer.
12. "Do you have any questions for us?"
Answer "Do you have any questions for us?" with two or three questions about the work itself, never with "No, everything is clear."
- "What should the person in this role have achieved after six months?"
- "What is the biggest challenge the team is facing right now?"
- "How does the team make decisions when people disagree?"
Which Questions Come Up in Almost Every DACH Interview?
Three practical questions come up in almost every interview in Germany, Austria and Switzerland: when you can start, what salary you expect and how good your German is. Questions 10 and 11 above cover the first two. The third deserves its own preparation.
State your German level on the CEFR scale (A1 to C2), the European framework for language levels, and add where you use German today: "B2; I handle my day-to-day admin in German and I'm taking a C1 course." If the interview is in English, ask the recruiter in advance whether part of it will be in German, and prepare at least your introduction in both languages.
If you have worked in Germany before, an interviewer may also ask about your Arbeitszeugnis, the written reference German employers issue at the end of a job. Know what yours says before you walk in.
What May an Interviewer in Germany Not Ask?
An interviewer in Germany may not ask questions aimed at characteristics protected by the General Equal Treatment Act (Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz, AGG): ethnic origin, sex, religion or belief, disability, age and sexual identity. That is why a German Lebenslauf, the German CV, does not need a photo or date of birth, and why questions about family planning are off limits.
The best-known case is pregnancy. The Federal Labour Court (Bundesarbeitsgericht) ruled in 2003 (2 AZR 621/01) that the question "Are you pregnant?" is not permitted, and that an applicant asked anyway may answer untruthfully.
A question the law forbids does not deserve an honest answer. It deserves a short one.
In the room, a calm redirect works better than a lecture: "That doesn't affect my ability to do this job. What matters for the role is …". This is general information, not legal advice.
Why Reading Model Answers Is Not Enough
Reading model answers helps you know what a strong answer contains, but it does not train you to give one under pressure. In the interview, nerves push most people back to their habits: long introductions, "we" instead of "I", a missing result.
Three things only show up when you answer out loud. You hear where your answer drifts. You notice when it runs past two minutes. And you find out which follow-up question you cannot answer yet.
Some candidates practise with a mock interview tool such as TalentVP to answer aloud and get structured feedback before the real interview. A friend with a stopwatch and the table above does part of the same job.
Knowing the answer and giving the answer are two different skills.
Your 6-Step Plan to Prepare Your Answers
- Pick your six stories. One success, one failure, one conflict, one piece of learning, one example of leadership without a title, one result you are proud of.
- Write each story in STAR form, five sentences at most, with one number or checkable result.
- Map the stories to the twelve questions above. Most stories answer two or three questions.
- Prepare the DACH facts: notice period, salary range as gross per year, German level on the CEFR scale.
- Say every answer out loud and time it. Cut anything after two minutes.
- Run one full practice interview with a friend or a mock interview, then rework the weakest two answers.
Bottom Line
The questions are predictable. Your evidence is not.
Good interview questions and answers come from six prepared stories, not from fifty memorised sentences. Answer first, prove it once, and stop talking.
Prepare the stories. Say them out loud.
Sources
- Structured Interviews, U.S. Office of Personnel Management: behavioural questions and the past-behaviour principle
- Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection, Sackett, Zhang, Berry & Lievens, Journal of Applied Psychology 107(11), 2022
- Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz (AGG), §1, Federal Ministry of Justice, gesetze-im-internet.de
- Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB), §622: Kündigungsfristen, Federal Ministry of Justice, gesetze-im-internet.de
- Bundesarbeitsgericht: Schwangerschaft darf geheim bleiben, Stiftung Warentest, on BAG ruling 2 AZR 621/01 (6 February 2003)
- Entgeltatlas, Bundesagentur für Arbeit
- CEFR global scale, Council of Europe
Related Guides
- 50 most asked interview questions: the full list, grouped by category
- How to answer "Tell me about yourself": the opening question in depth
- STAR method for behavioural questions: how to build the stories this article relies on
- We vs I in interviews: how to show your own part
