Can someone help me understand this so I don't make the same interview mistake again?

I recently had a competency interview with a bank. I was going in to it thinking, "I shouldn't stretch out my answers. I should be concise." But when we got there we were told by the HR person that we'd be asked 4 questions in each 30 minute interview. I was really surprised, all of my competency examples barely go on for as long as 2 minutes. So I forgot about my mental note to be concise and just rambled on for a long time.

But then we got lots of follow up questions for each of the original 4 questions, so I probably screwed myself.

Whenever you get follow up questions to a competency question, is this just something they planned to do? In a previous phone interview I had months ago, I was asked tonnes of different competency questions in 45 minutes. On the occasional times I was asked a follow up question based on one of my answers I was worried that it was because I wasn't giving enough detail in my examples, so the interviewer was smelling the BS and trying to attack me.

2 Comments
 

Follow up questions traditionally are pretty standard. Interiewers tend to ask questions regarding points you made for a few reasons. 1) They want to see how well you deal under pressure (You could potentially have an annoying client who asks a lot of questions, so it's good to see how you would tailor your answers to deal with that) 2) It's another way for them to gauge your technical knowledge by nitpicking for details and seeing how well you understood the question 3) Since your weren't given enough details, they like to ask questions to see if you can lead and develop the solution a little bit more by using your resources (past work experiences, working in a team, leadership skills, etc.)

 
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