Speaker 1: Hey y'all, this is Tameka the face behind Hey HR and I'm going to tell you all about great interview questions and answers are the typical ones that you should expect if you're interviewing for an HR journalist position. Y'all let me go ahead and give you a disclaimer real real quick. Every organization is not going to use the exact same questions but these questions should definitely get your mind focused in an area of the type of questions that be asked at any organization. So many times organizations will really pinpoint their questions to their industry or the things that are really difficult for them or the things that they find overwhelming and so the best place to find the answers for most of your questions if you're not already familiar with that company is going to be the job description and the job posting cool I mean that's kind of like a neutral place if you know somebody inside you know I'm saying holler at them but I'm gonna go through some questions I'm gonna go through some questions that are really common for hr journalists and actually i'm going to go through the answers for them too so if you want to know some common and very helpful interview questions as well as the answers for each question then definitely keep watching so one question that i have gotten ask often and not just in an hr journalist position but primarily in the hr journalist question is what interests you about this job this is a catch-all question if you guys have my interview q a freebie that's down in the description box then you already know the full take on why people ask this question and the answers that they're looking for but if you don't have that i'm gonna fill you in so they'll ask you what interests you about this job just to see if there's a particular thing that you may be stronger in. Do you have a stronger attraction for something which means typically people work better in that area of the work. HR journalism covers everything in human resources, covers everything with the employee life cycle. So it's so common that many times people will gravitate to one thing over the other. See my go-to has always been keep me away from payroll and recruitment. Now I like recruitment but still keep me away from payroll. So I would gravitate to a different answer and that's really what employees are looking for. So you can always say how you love challenges because HR generalist work comes with challenges. So that's one good answer. If someone asks you what attracts you to it, I like the challenges. I like being challenged in my daily work. It helps me stay on top of my, my grind. It helps me stay focused. You can say you like high interpersonal skills and you are comfortable with easily approaching others because HR generalist is going to talk to everybody. You're going to talk to the stakeholders that's internal and external. You're going to talk to all levels of employees. You're going to talk to so many different people on a regular basis, so many times you're going to find yourself presenting, you're going to find yourself being the go to person. And so it's very, very important to have high interpersonal skills. And then you can always talk about how you already have experience in HR. And you love performing a wide variety of tasks, because that's what HR is, particularly a journalist role. So what do you know about this position, guys, this is going to be great because you really can see as an interviewer, you can really see where that person's focus has been. Did they do some research on the company? As an interviewee, then you definitely want to talk about managing talent and onboarding new hires because that's so, so common as a journalist, managing employees' welfare, and being the mediator between the company and the employee. That's primarily your job. Yeah, the job does become a bit repetitious to some degree because you're maintaining things you're not really being strategic as a journalist but it does require that you know what's a good effective balance between a company as well as their employees and so another good question that's typically asked is the types of questions that may relate to recruitment or training or employee labor relations or compensation and benefits or people management or diversity and inclusion and so sometimes people may ask you what has been your most recent recruitment strategies, right? Because recruitment has been such a high thing that's been trending heavily, particularly since the pandemic. So expect a lot of recruitment questions. Though you're like, I'm not a full-time recruiter, that is part of your job. And they may ask about training. And primarily a generalist is going to do like onboarding training for everyone, kind of like your catch-all trainings, your required annual trainings. And then they're going to find a way to keep a record of that. is that a digital record keeping is that a binder that you're keeping are you just keeping in a certain section of employee files so you can expect questions that relates to that employee labor law so one thing that you can expect is if you're going to a company that has a union they're probably going to hit on a lot of those union questions or even like if there's a company that has a lot of risk they may hit on OSHA a lot comp and benefits they're definitely going to hit on that because you're going to be the driving force when it comes to open enrollment when it comes to new hires onboarding. So we can go down that whole list, but primarily those are the topics that you're going to find. They ask HR journalists in any interview. You may definitely, now let's go back to the recruitment thing just a bit. You may definitely get a question like, how do you recruit new employees in the organization? Y'all, y'all want to find your ways that has been most unique, that has been most successful. You want to definitely talk about what was the pain point that that company had, the action that you took with that recruitment strategy and the result that came from it, because that's going to show your most success in recruitment. Every company can't just say, oh, I just posted on my website and we get thousands of applications. Every company doesn't even know what that feels like. And so if you say that, that sounds very, very simple. And they'll be like, wow, so she just said magic, right? When in actuality, that company may have had a good brand. It may have been a company that's constantly posting jobs. It may have found a way to update old applicants on whenever a new job is posted. And they might not know that. So you definitely want to dive into the details of what you may have done. I would hit on more of your unique ways. If you went into professional groups, if you decided that you were going to do an online job fair and talk about the reasons why you did that. And then obviously, how did you do that? And then what was the result? Did you get tons of people, tons of applicants, that type of thing? So the next question that you get asked as an HR journalist in an interview is, describe how you will position our company to potential candidates. We're hitting back on this recruitment thing, right? So you're testing your knowledge of recruitment and that company. So you definitely want to do some research on that company. Make sure you know something about that company so that you can tie those two things together. You know, is this company located near a beach? Then you want to say, hey, I would definitely target candidates who are in the north or who aren't near a large body of water and tell them how great the beach life is. I would also tell them that we have during the summertime we close early on friday so it gives you a lot of time to go and enjoy the beach you know you just have to pay attention to that company that location like what's going on with them to be able to come up with a good recruitment strategy that can position that company good for potential candidates and so what do you think a good measure of training success would be you don't need to be a training expert to know the answers to that i mean one thing you definitely want to do is kind of look at where you've had some pain points before did you have a lot of workers' comp issues that related to a specific task. Okay, so now you want to figure out a way to create a unique training for that. And then once you create that training, look at your workers' comp cases. Did they go down now that you've done this training? Is this a training that you find yourself needing to implement in your new higher orientation? And guys, it's pretty easy to go to something like that. Another thing could be that you got audited by a regulatory body and they realized that you weren't training on sexual harassment and that you had some sexual harassment claims that came against your organization and so maybe now you want to implement like an annual sexual harassment training so that's just another good question y'all know y'all can definitely get me going down into a rabbit hole so i'm gonna go to the next question the next question would be what is a process that you have had to change and why what was the outcome again guys i always tell my clients to definitely use the par method where you point out the problem, you point out your action, and you give the result. I just said that just a second ago. I just didn't call it the PAR method, but that is your best way of always telling what was a problem that made you create this process, and then what was the outcome from that process after you implemented it, right? Some of the things, processes that you may want to head on to is like onboarding. You know, I realized that all of my candidates, all of my new hires, when I sent them a 30 or a 60-day post-survey, they were all replying that they didn't feel that they gather enough company knowledge when they were onboarding. So what I did was I revamped the onboarding policy or the onboarding procedures so that they can start learning from each stakeholder within our organization what that part of their team did, what that business unit handled, what was the success of it, and why do we need it for our organization. As a result, my upcoming new hires had different results, right? So that's telling your problem that you saw that company, that employees weren't satisfied or weren't understanding what your company did you told your action you went ahead and had people come in to help you with the onboarding process and your result was that your results changed from your post surveys to your future new hires cool i talk so fast about this thing sometimes i wonder so another good question or another common question that's happened or happens for hr journalists is tell me about a difficult time handling a situation for an employee y'all this is such a good question And this is such a go-to question because you are constantly getting employees that's going to come to you with an issue. It's no different than when I used to work at a call center and someone asked me like, what, how'd you like working at that call center? And I was like, I don't. People only call me for a problem. So they only call me if their bill's wrong, if they're paying late, if their phone's not getting good service, that type of thing. It's no different than HR unless you make a really good culture within your HR department. And even then they're going to be respectful and say, hey, I don't want to waste your time with this. I just wanted to know what you thought about it. But in most cases, it's not uncommon that your employees come to you when there's an issue. It's not always a negative issue. Sometimes they've had a qualifying event and they need to know how to change their employees. And that qualifying event could be, and they want to know how to change their benefits. That qualifying event could be, Tameka, we found out that we're pregnant we're having a baby what can we do to make sure that we're always covered it could be that they didn't just find out that they're pregnant but they find out that this baby may come early so they want to make sure they know what the coverage is and that they're doing everything for that and that they're also requesting the fmla leave and that they're doing that in a proper order and that they've completed all the documentation for that and so every problem that they come with is not like a issue the thing about it is most times it's not something that was on your to-do list for that day so it does cause you a bit of a problem because you gotta re-engineer like your day or what you thought your day was gonna be like or lose some time in your day and make up for that time later in another day so don't be afraid to ask for help whenever you're given an example of any difficult situation don't be afraid to say you know i use the help of this person or that person to manage this situation you don't always have to look like you say if they all by yourself matter of fact it'll show that you're a good team player you always want to make sure that you're referencing that you keep your manager informed because as a journalist unless you go to a super small organization you're not going to be running that hr department by yourself so you always want to keep your leader informed on what changes you made why you made them how they affected the department or the employees my final question is how do you stay current with employment laws y'all my go-to has always been that i'm on several different newsletters like HR.com and SHRM and HRCI and Human Resources Executive. You know, I'm in professional groups through social media. I attend SHRM meetings. I attend different events by law firms, employment law firms, where they're educating HR professionals on most recent cases. And so those are just like someone might go to, but you want to always make sure that you know how you're staying current. Particularly if you don't have a certification, you can go to those things, all the ones that I just listed, right? But if you have a certification, your first go-to should be, I stay current with all 60 of my credits for my certification. And as a result, I do this, this, this, and this, and just explain what you do to keep your current certification credits. This is a good time to share any external resources that you use, any times that you've attended conferences, ones that you anticipate to attend in the future, things like that. And so this was a very, very detailed way of doing interview Q&As. I've looked at a couple of these other videos because I just wondered, like, what was a good way to do this so it didn't seem boring. And I just took my own approach on it. So for those of you who found my channel for the very first time, I hope that you enjoyed my approach and consider subscribing. For those of you who are returning, please tell me in the comments, did you like this approach? Was it helpful? So at the end of the day, you guys know you can always visit my video on what it was like for me being an HR journalist. So I'll tag that video at the end so that you guys can have a second resource to kind of help you through any interview questions and start in your career in human resources or growing your career in human resources. Until then, I cannot wait to see you guys on the next video.