Employers spend around 33% of their profits on recruitment and will prefer to employ an applicant who will stay with the company for at least 2-3 years.
In reality, an employer will never really know what will happen in the future and how long an employee will work for one organisation. So why ask the ‘duration’ job interview question?
In most cases, an employer will only ask how long an applicant is likely to stay working for them – sometimes framed as the interview question ‘how long have you worked for your previous organisations?’ because the employer has experienced a high turnover of staff.
This interview question is common with contract work, project work, and for low paid or low skilled roles.
How to answer the interview question.
The interviewer with the ‘how long do you plan on staying with our company?’ interveiw question is concerned with staff retention.
Therefore the interveiw answer must reassure the employer to score high marks as part of a structured job interview.
How to reassure the interviewer.
One way to reassure the interviewer, to score high on the interview scorecard, is to explain how you have researched their organisation including the values and the company vision, or how you know friends who are employees of the company and who talk positively about the company culture, which has resulted in you wanting to make a career out of working for this particular company.
What you are doing with this interveiw tactic is saying – ‘I don’t just want any job, I want a career with your company.’
Another similar approach is the ‘matching’ technique. Here an applicant can talk about their personal values, what motivates them as an individual and which type of environment they work well in. And matching this to what the interviewer stated at the interview start (In most job interviews, the interviewer will kick off the job interview by discussing the job role, the team and the company culture)
Here you are showing how this organisation is the ideal workplace for your temperament.
A final interview technique is to express dislike.
This approach may sound dangerous, but in fact, it has the opposite result – desire.
When asked about duration, the interviewee can talk about how they dislike job hunting, moving from one company to the next having to learn new processes and procedures, and how they only applied for this role as it is their preferred employer.
Applicants can evidence how they are loyal to a company by explaining how they have worked for their previous employer for the past 10-20 or 30 years.
This approach is saying if you recruit me I will be a loyal employee.
