Last updated on December 17, 2023
Nowadays, English interviewing is more popular all over the world, especially in Western countries like Canada. In this article, I am going to show you guys some common interview questions in English and focus on IT jobs. Let’s dig it on.
Table of Contents
Can you introduce yourself? Tell me about yourself.
For this kind of question, the interviewers want the candidates generally to describe their biography and their career. This is a chance for candidates to show their passion for the position. However, experienced candidates may describe more about their experiences to match to the applied role.
The following example is my introduction for the experienced Web Developer position:
Hi there, I’m Tommy Do, currently working as a Web Developer in a Canadian company at Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I have graduated as a Java Software Engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology (NIIT) in Vietnam – A cooperative program from Vietnamese Hoa Sen University and NIIT corporation. Now I am a PHP Developer and full-time working with PHP language. In another word, I went to school to study software programming and I end up with a web developer.
Tommy Do
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
This question is one of common interview questions almost appears in every interviews. The purpose of this question is the interviewers want to know how do you evaluate yourself. Are you confident to your strengths and honestly talk about your weaknesses.
I have the ability to adapt very quickly to work and withstand pressure well. Moreover, I am a detail-oriented person, so I always pay attention to my work, my products, and their detail to give my users the best quality and best experience when they use my products.
However, I am still not really satisfied with my professional knowledge. That’s also the reason I signed up for more external courses to upgrade my coding skills.
Tommy Do
Why do you want to apply for this position?
For the strengths and weaknesses questions that are used to explore your abilities, this question is used to evaluate how your abilities would support to the position. This question is a big change to help you convince the employer that you are “the chosen one”.
I have more than 7 years of experience in the field of information technology. And I think that’s one of my advantages when applying for this position. It will be easier for me to receive information as well as handle the professional work of a developer in my company. Besides, I also have experience working with the programming language that the current company is applying.
I have a notice to you that you should practice this question on different scenarios, it depends on your applied position and its job description, so you can transform your answers dynamically.
What are your short term goals in your career path?
If you don’t have any plan or your target in your career even in your life, you are better to have at least one. Compared with the long-term target, the short-term target is more detailed. The interviewers would like to ask this question more often because they want to have detailed information about you and they may evaluate you more accurately.
I want to develop to a higher position and improve my knowledge of software programming with PHP language. My specialty is computer sciences, I also have knowledge of SQL server databases, Postgres, knowledge of Linux Ubuntu operating system, CakePHP Framework and NodeJS programming language. I want to continue to explore new languages at work.
What is your expected salary?
For this question, it is a huge difference between Eastern and Western culture. You might read some posts that guide you to select the smart answer to this question by going around and after telling them your expected numbers. You pretend to not care about your salary and try to tell them that you only want to dedicate yourself to the company.
Don’t even lie, you are in Canada – a Western country and a low-context culture. Let’s go straight to the point, tell them how much you want. If they ask, so tell them reasons later.
Eastern style:
My salary expectations are commensurate with my experience and qualifications. In addition, I have also searched about the market salary for this position as well as the jobs that I can do, so I would like to receive a salary in the range from $50,000 to $60,000.
Western style and I recommend this:
I would like to expect my salary is $65,500 annually.
Due to my experience and my abilities, I believe that number is good for me as well as a reasonable number for the company can handle for my position.
In a Western company and high-skill level position, we make a deal with annual salary ($40,000, $50,000, $100,000…e.g). We only deal salary per hour for labor jobs or low-skill level positions ($15/h, $20/h…e.g). We should not deal monthly, it is not common and the employer has to transfer to annual or hour one.
If you did not get used to converting your salary in annual or hours, practice it by using this tool: https://ca.talent.com/convert.
All in all, there are some common interview questions we should know before getting an interview in Canada. I hope my post will help you with some experience in looking for a job. If you feel this post is helpful, please Buy me a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/tommydo
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