No one is born with great interview skills. Highly effective interviewees develop their skills through practice and preparation. One of the keys to success is to know what things to prepare before the interview. Failure to know what to focus on before the interview often leads to people preparing the wrong things. This can actually harm your performance. Here are some tips from The Recruitment Alternative – Australia’s affordable recruitment agency:
1. Preparing Your Answers
The key to preparation is knowing that all employers will want to know about you. Such as:
- Do you have the skills, knowledge and experience to do the job?
- Are you the sort of person they can work with? In other words, what sort of person are you like at work?
- What are your motivation levels like? What are your motivators and de-motivators?
Preparing answers to these questions means that you will be able to answer virtually any question put to you! No more having to wade through hundreds of practice questions. Rehearse your answers aloud before the interview – it’s one thing to know what to say quite another to say it fluently. Remember: how you say things at an interview is just as important as what you say.
2. Research Preparation
Do not just focus on the specific skills that relate to the job you’re going for. You must also prepare answers to the generic competencies. These include planning and organising skills, communication skills, customer service skills, teamwork, coping with change and conflict resolution skills.
By researching the organisation, you are interviewing with, you can relate your prior experience to their business. Demonstrating at an interview that you’ve done a little research never fails to impress the interviewer. Prepare specific examples of what you’ve achieved and how you’ve achieved it. Do the same when you’re preparing answers about your personal attributes and motivators and de-motivators.
3. Ask Questions
Prepare some questions to ask in the interview but avoid asking too many questions at the end of the interview. Interviewers generally appreciate inciteful relevant questions.
It’s very handy to have a short summary statement highlighting your strengths up your sleeve. You can use this at the end of an interview as a final flourish – good endings at interviews are extremely important.
For more tips and career advice head to our ‘job seeker help centre’. Also to view all our current job listings, check out our ‘jobs board’. The Recruitment Alternative provides low-cost recruitment services to small businesses and operates throughout Australia and New Zealand including Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, etc. If you would like to find out more about our services, contact us today on 1300 548 546.
