Ascent Solutions

How to nail that job interview

There are three simple things that your interviewer will be considering when looking across that interviewing table.

1) Can you do the job?
2) Do you want the job?
3) Do I like you?

I find that by educating my candidates to think like a hiring manager or a recruiter it actually helps them through the interview process, and most people benefit from this advice.

Let’s first of all consider things from a candidate side; you are preparing for an interview; researching the company history and ‘about us’ pages, you’re looking at who works there, what they do, referring to a job brief or an advert to draw reference from and of course, you’re preparing answers to the usual competency-based questions assessing your strengths and weaknesses.

But remember, this is not a ‘memory test’ – this is more of a personality interview. I often find that those candidates who spend hours and hours scouring the internet for information on the company and trying to memorise it in a hope to rattle off some stats in the interview invariably don’t perform as well as those who have followed my advice. And it’s easy, its just three key steps.

To do this, you need to consider what the interviewer is doing prior to your interview wand understand how they are feeling. Would they have agreed to give up an hour of their time to meet you if they were not convinced by your CV? Unlikely. Are they going to read your CV and prepare for the interview in the hope to catch you out, thereby having a consistently negative approach to hiring? Let’s hope not. If they do, it may not be the job you’re looking for anyway. No, the reality is that a hiring manager wants nothing more than to feel positive and upbeat when they meet you and in that respect they want you to do well in the interview. Most hiring managers that I know (and have known) actually don’t enjoy recruiting. It often takes up so much time and distracts them from their day job; therefore they would want nothing more than to find the right person as quickly as possible.

Now that you’re thinking like a hiring manager, consider the obvious points such as presentation, time keeping and polite manners – but that stuff is very basic so we won’t dwell on the basics. Those three key points are:

1 – Can you do the job?

If you consider this basic question you will see that it answers the key point to recruitment. Every hiring manager wants to bring someone in for the position that is doing exactly the same job but somewhere else so that the impact to them and their team is minimal. So you need to demonstrate that you can do the job in the interview. This is more than just getting across your strengths and this is certainly not you rattling off boring stats of company history. This is thinking in advance about what the hiring manger is looking for, thinking ‘if I were recruiting for this position; what questions would I ask to test whether someone ticks all the boxes? What boxes need ticking? The job brief or job description will give quite a lot away, but also use your initiative and speak to friends or former colleagues for advice. If you know that they job requires you to attend nine meetings a week, then get across that you can achieve that and back it up with answers. If the job requires someone that understands the media agency market, then get across who you know and what you understand – this is much better research and a better use of your time rather than company stuff. Brush up on your skills and abilities and back them up with good examples. Make sure you know your experience and turn this into positives throughout the interview and match it to key boxes that you know the interviewer is looking to tick.

2 – Do you want the job?

Often this is the part that most candidates fall down in. they are so obsessed with researching companies, market trends, memorising what Obama stated last year in order to repeat some crappy self-help Anthony Robbins style nonsense, that they overlook the key things – attitude, desire and passion!

Imagine once again that you are the hiring manger. You have three candidates booked in for final interviews today. All have the exact same experience, the same contacts and industry knowledge and the same salary expectations – they are clones for the sake of this example in every way bar one – how much they want the job?

Candidate A and B do a good interview, match their skills and come across well; however they don’t ask many questions back to the interviewer. At the end of the interview they get up and leave as quickly and eagerly as if they had realised they left the oven on at home. Then candidate C comes along delivers an average interview compared to the others but there is one key difference – they ask loads of questions to the interviewer. How does this work? What about that? Would I be working directly with you? Could you see me doing this? And they leave the interviewer with no doubt that they really want the job; not only that they back it up with factual examples of why they want this specific job; if you gave me this opportunity I would benefit by x, y and z which is perfect to me.

This may seem a bit self-absorbed, but actually good hiring managers will know that people are motivated by more than one variable; therefore if they know why someone wants the job; it is easier to manage them.

How do you get across that you want the job? How about starting with telling them? Leave the interviewers with no doubt that if they offered the position to you then you would accept. Back this up with asking loads of questions throughout the interview so that you can justify that you now know loads more about the company and opportunity and that based on all this information that you have gained through natural curiosity that you have made an informed decision to state that you want the job. Very few interviewees actually get across correctly that they want the job and more often than not they come across as though they have simply attended the interview for interview sake.

Equally, if you are attending a final interview and have been asked to prepare a presentation (or something similar) then make sure you do it properly. This is a tangible gauge for an interviewer to see how much you really want the job. Candidate A turns up with some stuff, albeit good stuff, in his head. He delivers a good presentation and charms his way through. But what impression has he left? Candidate B doesn’t know the industry sector as well, has spent hours researching the market and has not slept for days preparing the all-singing all-dancing PowerPoint that has been checked and checked again by friends and relatives and practiced on in front of whoever is kind enough to lend an ear. They deliver the presentation, hand over a CD with it burnt on for the interviewer to slip into his computer later on for reference. Who would you give the job to? Exactly, even if candidate A has all the knowledge, most people would hire candidate B because they have proved that they want the job more.

3 – Do I like you?
Well, recruitment and hiring decision always comes down to personality. My advice here is be yourself, but be the polite self that met your fiancée’s parents for the first time rather than you at 20 climbing the lamppost in the town centre after slipping on a kebab. Be the self that walked up and shook the Dean’s hand on your graduation day, not the self that whinged to mum to get a sick note because you hadn’t done your chemistry homework. You want to be relaxed, but not too relaxed – a lot of my clients appreciate nerves in an interview because it shows that you want something. Too relaxed and you come across as cocky.

It’s all a fine balancing act, but if you think like a hiring manager and plan for your interviews in this way, I can almost guarantee better results. But of course, it depends on your preparation and effort.

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