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Are you a music fan? Do you listen to podcasts? When you listen to prerecorded content, do you listen actively or passively? Does what you’re listening to have your complete attention, or are you trying to do a variety of other things while listening? Most of our listening in the course of our day is passive. We hear lots of things. Some we absorb and some we dismiss. But the ability to discern the difference comes from active, versus passive listening. When the content is important to you, you listen far more actively and attentively than when it’s going in one ear and out the other.

Passive listening is fine when consuming entertainment. Yes, you might miss something subtle, or minor, but you are still likely to take in the majority of what you’re hearing. And what you miss, may not be that important to you at that time. The nice thing about prerecorded content is that you can go back and listen to it again if you did miss something.

When we engage in conversations with people whose knowledge and opinions matter to us, we tend to

pay more attention than during casual interactions. If the content is important to us – regardless of what that content is – we pay more attention. Isn’t what’s being said during an interview worthy of active listening?

Obviously, being an active listener is a great skill for a job seeker. Many job seekers have shared their belief they didn’t get hired because of the way they answered certain questions, probably due to their being inattentive. This is not uncommon. When an employer or interviewer isn’t ...  (read more:  https://hanklondon.com/active-passive/)

Every few weeks we pose a question you might get asked during an interview and a suggestion on how you might formulate your answer.

This week’s question:

There’s no right or wrong answer to this question! How you answer and things you share may reveal things about your personality, and therein lies the challenge. How you express your feelings, your likes and dislikes, attitudes toward technology, attitudes toward humanity, change and organization, could be sources of judgement by your interviewer. Consider addressing the way tech has simplified your life, provided access to information/content faster than ever before, how it encouraged or necessitated that you learn things you never dreamed you’d want to learn. Let your interviewer know of the different ways tech furthered your personal growth, individually and as an employee. Also mentionable is that you share the same frustrations with technology that everyone else experiences, such as: automated customer service, texts & emails that don’t go through, network/wifi/bluetooth connections that drop or buffer at the worst times, all computer issues, hardware and software, etc. Of course, the youngest workers haven’t been changed by tech to the same degree as Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Y, as lots of today’s technologies didn’t exist when they started their work lives.

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To see previous installments of

Tough Interview Questions and Answers,

click here

(Most recent are at the Bottom of the list.)