Interview Tips

Inter­views can be a fairly rapid assess­ment of your skills, expe­ri­ence, per­son­al­ity, val­ues and aspi­ra­tions and it is vital that you make a good first impres­sion. You need to think about how to sell your­self and con­vince your poten­tial employer that you can do the job bet­ter than other can­di­dates he/she might be meet­ing and that he/she likes you enough to want to work with you.

Before the interview:

• Research the company’s prod­ucts, per­for­mance, staff and com­peti­tors. Also, research the inter­viewer on the inter­net. Find out about their career and what makes them tick. Dis­cover if there are any issues dear to them that might give you some com­mon ground and enable you to build rapport.
• Pre­pare ques­tions. Ask about how the inter­viewer sees the job devel­op­ing, about the team, what style of man­age­ment he/she has and what their expec­ta­tions of you would be.
• Find out what style of inter­view the com­pany uses and whether you will be expected to do a pre­sen­ta­tion. If com­pe­tency based inter­view­ing is used, be ready to give exam­ples of how you work eg how you man­age your team or how you over­come dif­fi­cult situations.
• Pre­pare how to pitch your­self – what you have achieved, how you can add value to their busi­ness, why they should employ you over others.

At the interview:

• Give a firm hand­shake and lots of eye con­tact — it sounds obvi­ous but you’d be amazed at how many senior peo­ple still get it wrong.
• Be pos­i­tive and enthu­si­as­tic. Don’t be neg­a­tive about past col­leagues or employers.
• Don’t dis­cuss pack­age at the first inter­view unless the inter­viewer raises the sub­ject. You can nego­ti­ate once you have an offer but you don’t want to give the impres­sion that money is your main motivator.
• Turn ques­tions about weak­nesses or past mis­takes into pos­i­tives. Describe how you learnt from the sit­u­a­tion and what would you do given the same sce­nario in future.
• Demon­strate why you are inter­ested in the par­tic­u­lar job and in the com­pany in gen­eral. Many expe­ri­enced can­di­dates don’t suc­ceed because they for­get to address obvi­ous issues around motivation.
• Let the inter­viewer know your thoughts at the end of the inter­view and ask for their thoughts on you. This gives you the oppor­tu­nity to over­come any con­cerns they might have.