Interviews

You’ve finally got your opportunity; a call to interview!! It’s now time to move beyond form filling, creating accounts and passwords, submitting CV’s and those horrible rejection emails. But do you ace interviews? Or like most people do you feel the pressure and you close up and find it difficult to answer the questions well? At Help Me Succeed we help people like you get ready for interview and teach you techniques to be ready for any interview you have in the future. Here are our recommended preparation steps to ensure you are successful:

Preparation

It doesn’t matter if you have just finished School and are preparing for your very first interview, or if you are an experienced executive – preparation is so important. You must be ready, consider what you might be asked to talk about. What are the typical interview questions? What are the competencies being sought? What personal brand messaging do you want to get over and how are you going to weave this into your answers? You should also prepare to answer and talk about any Industry recent developments.

Read the detail

Does the Interview include any psychometric tests? If they do we would highly recommend you practice answering these questions by either using online materials or purchase a book of questions. This will help with fluency of answering these types of questions as often they are timed based assessments. Every little you can do here will help give you the edge against the competition. Does the Interview include a pre-prepared presentation? If this is requested, they will want to hear ‘how’ you talk, and will also want to see how you approach the challenge set. You might also need to submit presentation materials prior to the day of the interview. Make sure you have rehearsed your presentation so you are slick on the day.

Research the company

Many of the candidates that we coach for interview do not know basic information about the company where they’ve applied to work. Take some time to look around their website – there are simple things you can find out, what products and services they offer, what their financial performance has been like, what are their corporate values, recent publications or news articles. Showing basic knowledge of the company will help you build rapport with the interviewer(s).

Typical Interview Questions

Be prepared to answer the typical interview questions. Why do you want the job, what makes you better than the other candidates, how will you deal with challenges of the role? For competency based interviews, make sure you have two or three examples of how you have demonstrated these values, competencies, or behaviours previously. Also make sure you have questions for them too – an interview is a two way discussion, so perhaps you want to know about what the interviewers like about working for the organisation, or what the culture is like?

STAR technique

Your interviewer will lead the discussion, but will ask you open questions. Then it is over to you to provide your answer. A good response to open questions is the STAR technique – which stands for Situation, Task, Action and Result. So first introduction the situation to set the scene and provide context, then describe the task and what needed to be done. Then follow up with the action that you took. And finally describe the result in terms of the question being asked. This technique can be used for answering most questions.

If you have reached the bottom of this page and you now have your interview preparation nailed – brilliant, that’s what we are here for. If you feel you need some extra help to succeed at Interview, then pick our interview package and we will get you ready and leave you with the confidence to prepare for any interview you have in the future.