Employers may ask you a range of questions at your Project Manager interview. The questions will vary depending on the role and job description, but they will likely be a mix of technical and behavioral interview questions. The questions will assess your project management knowledge and expertise. Equally as important, the employers will be seeing how well you would fit in with the company.
Employers are eager to find Project Managers who can lead and work well with a team. During the interview, candidates should emphasize their skills and strengths, backed with facts and figures. Employers may also ask a Project Manager candidate interview questions regarding past challenges or failures. If you’re asked to elaborate on unsuccessful projects, focus on what you learned and how you adapted. Employers want to test your problem-solving skills and make sure you’ll be the right fit for their team.
The best way to prepare for your Project Manager interview is to practice. Ask a friend or colleague to do a mock interview with you, or record and listen back to your responses. Prepare a variety of real-life examples that support your project management experience. To help you with your interview preparation, we have compiled a list of frequently asked PM interview questions and answers.
1. How do you define an ideal project?
This question, being one of the most important project management interview questions, intends to know the type of projects you would like to take up. By answering this question honestly, you open up an opportunity to manage projects that excite you or those in which you can excel. Your answer should include multiple points such as whether you like to work as part of a team or alone, the kind of deadlines you prefer, whether you are interested in innovative and creative projects or not, and more.
2. Work from home has become the new normal in the post-COVID-19-world. How well are you prepared to manage a remote team?
In the present world, project managers often choose their teams from a global workforce and are expected to manage teams remotely. You should be equipped with the knowledge and skills to work with team members virtually. It calls for a different management technique. Your answer to this project management interview question should clearly describe the project management methodology you may choose to manage people and resources in a remote environment.
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.
4. What is the most desired skill that is required to become a successful project manager, according to your experience? Please give us a couple of examples regarding your past projects.
If you are experienced in project management, you might probably know that there is no single skill that is enough for a successful career in the field. To be a successful project manager, you should possess multiple skillsets like leadership skills, communication skills, negotiation skills, and time management skills, to name a few. To answer this question promptly, you should be able to justify why you have chosen a particular skill. You can include a couple of examples to substantiate your answer.
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.
6. Suppose the project has gone off the rails. What steps would you take to get it back on track?
Once you realize a project is not going as per the pre-planned time, budget, scope, or goals, the next top priority is to get it back on track. The project manager should be efficient enough to take the necessary steps to resolve the discrepancy between actual progress and planned progress. Your answer to this project management interview question may include re-adjusting resource management, finding the real cause of off-tracking, putting in extra effort, and more.
7. What’s your background, personally and professionally?
It’s important to get a snapshot of the applicant to bring their project manager resume into sharper focus. Knowing a bit about their life story can inform about their soft skills and how they might respond to issues at work, and whether they will fit into the corporate culture. The same goes for their project management experience. Staying at a single job for a long time can be either bad or good for project managers, but you won’t know until you put their choice into context.
8. Have you worked in this industry before?
Does the candidate have project management experience in your industry? That’s important because they might excel at the project management methods your company uses, or may have the right risk management skills to manage your projects. If they don’t, it’s not a game-closer. Much of project management is the same from industry to industry. Perhaps they have strong project management skills that relate to your industry, such as project management software skills even if they don’t have direct experience. However, if they do have experience in your field, that’s a plus, so ask how those relevant projects panned out. Note how confidently they answer behavioral interview questions. You want an authentic person who is comfortable in the position.
9. Do you have budget management experience?
It helps to drill down into specific aspects of the project management experience of your candidates. Naturally, if the candidate has specific skills they’ll be briefly sketched in the resume, but here’s your opportunity to get a deeper sense of where they stand in terms of their experience with project management processes such as budget management. Project managers are known as planners. They create a project schedule and lead teams to success. But there’s often money involved, so they better know how to handle a project budget.
10. Have you managed remote teams?
Not all projects are executed under one roof and remote teams are very common. With more dynamic project management tools and a global workforce to choose from, many project managers might never meet the members of their team, at least in person, but they’ll be able to work together using project management software. Then there are the necessary resources that will be outsourced, which involves a different resource management technique than when working with employees. Knowing how they have managed people and resources can help you get an overview of their leadership skills and be a crucial point in your decision to hire or not to hire.
11. What sort of project management software and tools do you use?
Unless the information is included in the job posting - and it’s certainly worth looking - you won’t know exactly which project management tools are used at different companies. So you should aim in your answer to illustrate a breadth of different tools and programs that you have experience using. You would like to include industry-standard communication and PM tools like Microsoft Project, Trello, or Basecamp since there’s a good chance their organization will at least use one of them. This will also show your overall technical skills and proficiency.
• What project management software do you typically use?
• What’s your project management methodology of choice?
• What budget management experience do you have?
• Do you have experience managing remote team members or outsourced resources?
• Tell us about the different kinds of project management tools you have worked with.
• Describe your strategy for prioritizing tasks.
• Tell us about your experience with process development.
• What’s your proficiency level with [project management software/tool]?
• How do you approach assessing the risks of a project? How do you manage them over the project’s lifetime?
• Please tel us how you schedule projects and establish timelines.
• What is the very first thing you do when assigned a new project?