“How do you manage your time and prioritize tasks?” A tough graduate student interview question

If you have an interview for a graduate job or summer internship coming up, you may have thought of examples of when you managed your time effectively or dealt with competing deadlines, perhaps when you juggled your studies with a part-time job , or in a workplace situation. However, you might not have expected a follow-up question: when faced with a number of different tasks, what techniques do you use to prioritize and work your way through them?

Get help answering tougher interview questions with our article on the top nine tough interview questions and answers.

How not to answer the interview question “How do you manage your time and prioritize tasks?”

Don’t be misled by the question or avoid the answer by retreating to the safety of an example of when you successfully managed your time. You were asked how, not when.

What is the Graduate Recruiter Really Asking?

Will you be able to handle different tasks with different deadlines without getting confused and forgetting what you need to do? Can I trust you to go ahead with this and use your common sense? How organized are you? Will you spend forever scrambling to make color-coded lists, or will you actually tackle what needs to be done?

So how do you answer the interview question “How do you manage your time?”

This is a sample answer:

“I’m making a list. I determine the order in which to do things by considering which tasks are urgent and how important each task is. If I’m not sure what’s urgent and what’s not, or how important different tasks are, I find out. If I’m given a new task, I add it to the list and decide when to do it, so I adapt the order in which I do things as necessary.”

It doesn’t matter how you make your list—whether you write it down in a notebook or a desk journal, or use an app or other online tool—but be prepared to explain your preferred technique to your interviewer. You may have a different system for prioritizing and organizing your work. Whatever it is, be prepared to talk about it.

Another important aspect of time management is to set goals and break larger projects into small, manageable steps. Self-awareness can also be helpful. You may have noticed that there are certain times of the day or week when you are comfortable tackling certain tasks, and this can be a factor in planning what you will do when. This can be part of effective time management – ​​although you will need to make it clear that you can adapt and be flexible.

Good time management will help you with a variety of other skills and competencies that graduate employers are looking for, from persistence, resilience, reliability and coping with stress to problem solving and teamwork. If you look back at the challenges you’ve overcome and the accomplishments you’re proud of, chances are your time management techniques have come into play. You just need to be able to tell your future employer how you managed to fit it all in.

Your time management skills can also be tested through an electronic whiteboard exercise on the day of the assessment centre, through a personality questionnaire or through gamification, a graduate recruitment approach where you are asked to play an online game to show your answers in different situations.

You can test your answer to this tough interview question by completing a practice interview using resources from our partner Shortlist.Me.