How many of us have gone into an interview feeling unprepared? We all do it, even recruiters go for interviews (as paradoxical as it seems!). It is that familiar feeling, when you’re stood outside the office of your new potential employer and suddenly the harsh reality hits that Googling a list of common interview questions perhaps hasn’t prepared you as well as you’d hoped! With each job interview, you are meeting new people, selling yourself and your skills, and finding out what it is you know and don’t know. It is understandable why these scenarios can feel rather daunting. That said, there are ways to make a job interview feel much less stressful – a little bit of the right kind of preparation can go a long way! Here we are sharing with you JMT's top tips to make sure you ace your preparation and have a successful interview.
So, how do you prepare for an interview? Here are some key things we believe will help you to feel as prepared as possible for your interview.
It’s all about trying to anticipate the questions they’re going to ask you. This sounds like I’m stating the obvious here but we’ll look into this in more detail in a second.
Working with your Recruitment Consultant to understand some of the softer points about the opportunity, not just the physical facts such as more about the company and role, but more about the people you’re meeting and the culture.
Take examples, but make sure they’re as relevant as possible. So to achieve point one you need to understand as much about the business and the role as possible. For example, find out exactly what the business does, what their product is, the size of the company, the industry or industries they work in, customers they have and so on. For the role, you need to know what you’ll actually be doing on the day to day such as the software you might use, the people you’re speaking to, product line you’ll work on, where in the process you will work on a project. For example, if you’re going for a Project role, you should find out where you pick up the project and where you would pass it on and each individual step in-between, the project value, will you use Microsoft Project, who will you deal with? I’m sure you get the point… so now take this information, and simply think about your best example for each point where you’ve had experience with that particular point. I would recommend doing this in a mind-map format, but it’s up to you.
Of course, you won’t have examples for each point (and if you do you should get the job!). For the ones you don’t, make the effort and do the research to find out as much about those points as possible. Say if you don’t have experience working in a specific industry, research as much as you can about that industry. Being honest and saying “I haven’t got experience of that but having done some research into it…” can really help. Showing your willingness and ability to learn is very important.
For point two, this is straight forward, make sure you challenge the the Recruitment Consultant representing you to have the information you need on exactly who you’re meeting, what they’re like as people, what they’re looking for and the culture of the business.
And for point three, this may seem straight forward but is actually a key opportunity to illustrate what experience you have, see this as your second CV! It’s also an excellent opportunity to break the ice.
For anymore hints and tips on what to think about before an interview, feel free to contact us.
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