Be prepared for these project manager interview questions. With answers!

The position of project manager is popular among business professionals seeking career advancement, thanks to its fairly relaxed educational requirements. If you do get invited to a job interview after applying to a project manager opening, the hiring manager will question you extensively on your experience with leadership, organization, and other such managerial skills.

To answer these project manager interview questions in a clear, articulate fashion, it’s a good idea to prepare a list of answers in advance that describe your project manager qualities in the best possible light. The sections in this article each cover specific categories of questions that hiring managers might ask during an interview, including:

• Questions about yourself

• Questions about your familiarity with the industry

• Questions about prior experience with projects

• Questions about how you prioritize tasks

• Questions about successes and mistakes 

• Questions about principles of teamwork

• Questions about project management tools

• Questions about communicating with customers or stakeholders

Project manager interview questions that ask you to introduce yourself

Before getting into the project manager-specific interview questions, most hiring manager will start off their interview with this classic opening query:

• “Can you tell me a bit about yourself?”

Often, this question is asked in a casual friendly tone, an icebreaker that gets tense job applicants to lower their guard and open up to the interviewer. Indeed, this question is relatively easy to answer and requires little to no research. Simply talk about your main profession, where you come from, and what your skills and interests are. Always keep it job-related.

Your goal is to make a good impression at the start of the job interview and prove you’ve got what it takes to fulfill the job’s responsibilities. To this end, whenever you talk about your career history during the job interview, focus on describing experiences that are relevant to the position of project manager. For instance:

• Past careers where you led or managed a team

• Hobbies or volunteer activities that require strong organization skills

• Niche useful skills such as computer programming or foreign languages

• Broadly useful skills such as problem solving or budget planning

During this early stage of the interview, the hiring manager might also ask follow-up questions such as:

• “How did you first learn about this job opening?”

• “What about this project manager position caught your interest?”

• “What do you hope to achieve in this position?”

The answers you give to these questions should be honest and reflect your true sentiments. At the same time, the answers you give (under ideal circumstances) should include or mention keywords and phrases taken from the project manager job description or the company website. 

This shows hiring managers that you’ve researched the company they work for and have familiarized yourself with the position you’re trying to fill. It also conveys your passion and enthusiasm for the idea of becoming a project manager.

Interview questions that test your knowledge of the industry

Project managers are employed by a wide range of companies, each with their own business model, product line, and other methods for generating profit and growth. Because of this, hiring managers interviewing you for the position of project manager will frequently test your knowledge of their job’s specific responsibilities with questions such as:

• “How much do you know about our company’s business?”

• “Have you used our products/services before?”

• “Do you have any questions about our company?”

If you have direct experience with the industry of the company you’re seeking work with, you shouldn’t have much trouble answering these questions. If you have little experience with your prospective company’s industry, research the basics of it before attending the interview. 

If there are aspects of the company you can’t quite grasp, be honest with your interviewer about your unfamiliarity and ask them incisive questions to show your curiosity and passion.

Interview questions about the projects you’ve worked on in the past

Even if you have no prior experience leading a project team, odds are good you’ve worked on a project as part of a team in past careers. Recounting and recalling the role you played in this project can help you deftly answer project manager interview question like the following:

• What types of projects have you worked on in the past?

• What role did you play in these projects?

• How  large was the project team you belonged to?

• What goals were these projects meant to accomplish?

• What did you learn from these projects?

When answering these types of questions, specific details may be better than general details. If possible, describe the outcome of the projects you worked on with statistics and reliable estimates of how much money was earned, how many customers were subscribed, how many designs were finalized, etc. 

By citing these specific amounts and gains, interviewers will have reason to think you can replicate your past successes if hired to work for them as a project manager.

Project manager interview questions about your task prioritization methods

Being a project manager means juggling lots of responsibilities: creating and assigning tasks, recording milestone due dates in a calendar, delegating responsibilities to members of your team, making phone calls, etc. 

To evaluate your time managements skills and organizational skills in the capacity of a project manager, hiring managers at you job interview my ask you questions along these lines:

• “How do you decide what tasks to accomplish first?”

• “How do you make sure project milestones are completed on time?”

• “How do you deal with unexpected delays or abruptly increased workloads?”

To answer questions about assigning priority to project tasks, you can bring up tools such as the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, a four-quadrant chart used to sort tasks into the following categories:

To answer questions about completing projects in a timely fashion, describe your planning methods by citing real-life projects you worked on in the past. If you can, discuss practical lesson you learned such as:

• Judging how long a project task will take.

• Checking in with team members to measure their progress.

• Providing team members with tools and guidelines to help them work faster.

• Extending deadlines in your work calendar just in case your team gets delayed.

Interview questions about your greatest successes and greatest setbacks

Project management interview questions about your past accomplishments are easy enough to prepare for. Simply think back to moments in your former careers where you accomplished stand-out deeds similar to these:

• Generated revenue for the company that exceeded quotas.

• Founded and trained a cohesive project team full of motivated experts.

• Established new procedures or databases that improved work efficiency.

• Ensured that a project was completed ahead of schedule.

• Participated in a project with results that exceeded expectations.

Often, these sorts of special accomplishments will be listed on the professional resume you submitted. If your interviewer asks you about these specific accomplishments, describe the achievement in more detail and put emphasis on the methods and attitudes that let you succeed.

Interview questions about your failures and setbacks can be much harder to answer, and may take the following forms:

• “Can you tell me about a time where you struggled to complete a project on time?”

• “What was the hardest project you ever worked on?”

• “Have you ever had to work with project team members who were uncooperative or disruptive?”

When replying to these sorts of questions, keep the following guidelines in mind.

As with the infamous interview question “What is your greatest weakness?”, your goal is to be honest about your past errors while also convincing hiring managers that you’ve grown beyond your past missteps.

Questions about how you coordinate and motivate project teams

Even at the smallest companies, project managers need to delegate important responsibilities to members of the project team they assemble (or are appointed to lead). If a project manager tries to do everything by themselves, they aren’t upholding their duties as a manager.

To judge your proficiency at delegating a leading a team, hiring managers at project manager job interviews may expect you to answer these leadership interview questions:

• “Do you have a preferred leadership style?”

• “Do you have experience recruiting or training project team members?”

• “Are there specific team-building exercises or icebreakers you like to use?”

You can answer questions like these by mentioning one or more of the popular leadership styles below. Note that each methodology has its own way of motivating team members.

As you talk about these styles of leadership with your interviewers, cite moments in your old careers where you used certain leadership styles. Describe which styles you found most effective and identify the specific methods from each style that you feel would work best for the project manager position you’re pursuing. This will help the interviewers see if you’re a fit for the company’s culture.

Questions about the tools and resources you use to keep projects organized

In many modern workplaces (particularly remote workplaces), managers use a wide variety of digital tools to facilitate communication and record information. To see how adept you are at using these tools in a project manager position, interviewers will often quiz you with questions along these lines:

• “What tools do you use to keep track of project deadlines?

• “What tools do you use to communicate with team members outside normal work hours?”

• “Are you familiar with database languages like SQL?”

If there are specific digital tool products you’ve used in past careers, you can mention them by  name and share your thoughts about how useful they were. If none of your previous careers used these tools, you can instead do some research about the more popular tools on the market and which of them you believe are most helpful when it comes to completing a project. For online chats, instant messaging, and video conferencing with team members, project managers might use the following sets of software:

• Slack: An instant messaging platform designed for workplaces

• Discord: Originally designed for text/voice chats between video game players

• Microsoft Teams: For workplace chats, video conferencing and file storage

• Google Chat: For 1:1 and group video chats

• Zoom: For video conferencing, screen sharing

The software listed below are generally used to assign tasks to team members, keep track of project progress, and share access to documents and data. They are also worth mentioning during a job interview for a project manager position.

• Asana: For assigning tasks, messaging team members, and uploading project information

• Monday.com Work OS: For hosting webinars, creating proprietary project management software and other custom digital tools

• Google Drive: For uploading, storing, and accessing documents or other digital flies

• Basecamp: For project management, file storage, and message boards

Interview questions for project managers about how you interact/build good relations with stakeholders

As a project manager, a single leader within the larger company, you’ll be expected to regularly report to stakeholders - that is to say, individuals with a stake or interest in the work you and your team are doing. Any of the following individuals can be stakeholders for a business:

• Other managers in the company

• Owners of the company

• Shareholders of the company

• Customers of the company

• Suppliers for the company

• Government agencies

Before hiring you as a project manager, interviewers will want to take sure you have the interpersonal communication skills and attitude needed to build a rapport with stakeholders, keep them up to date on project progress, and earn their continued trust and support. To gauge your experience in these matters, they might ask questions like:

• “Have you ever had to handle unhappy customers or stakeholders?”

• “What have you done or said in the past to address the concerns of customers/stakeholders?”

• “In past careers, how often did you send project progress reports to supervisors?”

• “How experienced are you with the process of stakeholder analysis?”

If you can’t describe first-hand experience with stakeholder interactions, you can answer these questions in two other ways. 

First, you can talk about the stakeholder-engaging activities a former supervisor of yours performed and then explain what you learned from observing.

Alternatively, do some pre-interview research on popular methods for identifying important stakeholders and regularly corresponding with them. During the interview, bring up these methods and ask the hiring manager(s) if they would work well in the project manager positions you’re pursuing.

Key takeaways

1. During project managers interviews, be ready to answer questions about why you’re interested in the position, how much you know about the company’s industry, and projects you’ve worked on/led in the past.

2. To prove your qualifications for the positions of project manager, be ready to answer interview questions about your past successes/failures, your leadership style, and your methods for motivating a team, prioritizing tasks, and interacting with stakeholders.

3. Before your interview, shore up any gaps in your knowledge with research about popular leadership methods and digital tools/resources made to facilitate project management, particularly in the areas of project organization and working with stakeholders.