In this blog, you will learn the following on-site interview preparation tips:
You will also learn:
- Questions to ask job candidates to elevate their resume and interview strategy.
- Basics of interview coaching.
- Coaching star candidates.
Uncertainty has seeped into all aspects of our lives thanks to the pandemic. We don’t know what the economy or the job market is going to look like in the coming months. Employees are uneasy and worried; they’re putting their growth plans aside in favor of stabilizing their jobs. Many are considering this to be a bad time to think about climbing the ladder.
I would argue this is the best time to think about career development.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, America’s job picture is improving. Firms are starting to rehire employees; furloughed employees are coming back.
“In August, employment rose in several major industry sectors. A gain in government largely reflected the hiring of temporary workers for the 2020 Census. Notable job gains also occurred in retail trade, in professional and business services, in leisure and hospitality, and in education and health services.” said William W. Beach, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (Sep 4).
As recruiters, now is the perfect time to help candidates execute their growth plans. You help candidates assess the reality of their situation and build action plans to address their core challenges. Doing so can and will help you shorten interview cycles.
After all, the better your talent is at articulating their strengths, the more time you save.
However, there is one part of this process that candidates may struggle with: how to ace their interviews.
In the past five years, I have helped clients pass interviews with leading organizations like Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle, Tastemade, and MIT.
With my practical on-site interview preparation tips, I build client confidence, strengthen their foundations, and elevate their answers.
And I can do this all within 15-20 minutes!
I’m going to share four on-site interview preparation tips that you can share with your candidates and immediately improve their interview performance. This won’t take more than 15 minutes of your time.
Quick side note before we begin: Have a look at my two-page, salary-doubling resume cheat sheet that will optimize your existing resume and definitely boost your interview performance by offering an ideal first impression. It breaks down exactly how a marketing manager was able to get their dream job AND double the initial offer they received. Get your copy by submitting your information below:
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1: Research Made Easy
Research isn’t the boogie-man candidates fear it to be. It doesn’t have to be a long and complicated process of wading through pages upon pages of Google search results. For the first interview, candidates don’t need to know everything about the company they’re applying to. The key question to answer is “what is the company looking for from an average employee?”
To learn this, candidates need to research these two areas:
- The target company’s “About Us” section
- The job listing
By building a strong understanding of the target company’s skill/culture requirements, candidates can better sell themselves during an interview. The message candidates want to send is “I can be a valuable member of your tribe because we hold the same values in common!” Studying the company’s “About Us” section tells candidates what the company’s key cultural values are. And studying the job listing tells them what hard and soft skills are needed for the open position.
Candidates who fail to understand a target company’s cultural needs and job requirements fail in presenting themselves as a strong candidate. Simply put, they fail to align themselves with the target company’s needs.
If you’re not in a position to talk too deeply about the company with candidates in early stages, you can still talk about the cultural values they are looking for.
Are they looking for someone agile, who can adapt to new processes quickly? Or do they prefer candidates with deep knowledge, who can make long-lasting and consistent impacts?
Thinking about these and other questions and conveying them to your candidates is key to ensuring their success.
Because based on these cultural values, they can formulate answers that show they can adapt to or fit well within those cultural values.
For example, if you know that your client is looking to retain a candidate in a marketing position for several years, it’s advisable to tell your candidate to minimize interview responses that talk about how they changed their teams many times over a few years. On the other hand, a company looking for an agile candidate might like this response.
2: Make a Strong First Impression
“What’s a good way to answer ‘tell me about yourself’?” is maybe the most common question I hear from candidates.
Depending on the candidate’s career history, I recommend one of the 3 strategies:
- Passion appeal
- Career summary
- Highlight reel
Let’s look at these one by one.
Passion Appeal
If a candidate opted for their field because of a strong emotional connection, I recommend the passion appeal. For example, if a candidate tells me: “I became an environmental engineer because when I was a kid, I lived in a neighborhood that got flooded often. My friends often got sick as a result. I want to help people by making water management systems more reliable,” I would recommend that they incorporate this story into their introduction because it demonstrates a true passion for their job.
Highlight Reel
For accomplished candidates who have a string of victories under their belt, I recommend the highlight reel. “Share your best and biggest success stories from the get-go,” I advise these candidates. “Show them that you’re a rockstar.” This is doubly applicable for people applying for sales jobs. When a company wants people who bring results, it’s a good approach to share the success stories straight away.
Here’s a good example: “I got my start in marketing when I was just a sophomore at MIT; I was selected to work on the marketing team of the Sloan Management Review due to my publishing experience in high school. My first job was at Spike Solutions; during my two years there, I increased web traffic ten-fold. After that, I worked at Berrydale as a marketing manager, and due to my digital and direct marketing efforts, I was able to double our client base within my first year there.”
Career Summary
For most candidates, the career summary is the way to go. I advise the following formula: Years of experience/academic background + current and relevant job responsibilities + one project/accomplishment. Containing the answer within this scope enables candidates to present themselves as a capable applicant. The message candidates want to send is “I am capable of doing this job because I have the necessary technical and professional expertise.”
Here’s an example: “As a marketing manager, my skills include digital marketing, direct marketing, and building management teams. During my tenure at Riddlectronics, I led a team of an SEO specialist, a Google Ads specialist, and several social media marketing specialists. By working closely with all of my teammates, I was able to advise on all their activities and improve our KPIs. After that, I joined Alphacom, where I worked more closely with the executive team to oversee a brand overhaul.”
3: Elevating Answers by Using CAR
The single biggest issue faced by candidates is poorly structured answers. They’ll start from the middle, go back to the start, go off on a tangent, come back to the middle, make a U-turn, and forget the conclusion. As a listener, you’re left confused.
I tell candidates to adopt the CAR method for every answer. Explain the Context/Challenge. Share the Actions. End on the Result.
It won’t matter what the story is; as long as they stick to this script and make sure they are speaking to the research they conducted in step 1, they will make a good impression. They will be showing their strengths in a logical and organized method. And by ending each answer on a positive result, they will solidify their impression as a results-driven applicant.
4: Strong End of Interview Questions
Many candidates make the mistake of asking weak end-of-interview questions or no questions at all. The most typical scenario involves the candidates asking “when can I expect to hear back from you?” which immediately creates a desperate impression.
Candidates need to ask questions at the end of the interview. These questions can be about the company culture, opportunities for future growth, and their performance. “Is this a newly created position or was it recently vacated? Can you please share why the position was recently vacated? How will my performance be measured in the first 90 days? What challenges will I be expected to help you address after joining?”
I encourage candidates to have five questions on hand at all times. Here are some more questions candidates can ask during the interview.
I remind candidates to pick questions that imply “I’m thinking of the future when I’m already working here. I want to know how we can help each other win.”
Conclusion
Elevating any client’s interviewing skills is about strengthening their foundations. These four interview preparation tips will help your candidates build a strong impression in interviews. And as recruiters, you can expect to see an increase in placements, offer acceptances, and candidate engagement. All of these directly build stronger relationships with both clients and candidates.
Are there any other tips and recommendations that you give your clients during candidate coaching? Let me know in the comments below.
You might also be interested in this blog on interview-coaching IT candidates specifically.
If you are a candidate reading this blog, you can use these interview preparation tips to improve your interview performance greatly. Here are some interview mistakes you must avoid.
I often work with candidates who struggle with articulating their accomplishments during interviews. I’ve been told by my recruiter friends that they also run into this issue.
If you’d like me to give a workshop to you and your colleagues on any of the following topics, please get in touch.
1. Questions to ask candidates to elevate their resume and interview strategy
This workshop is for recruiters who have star candidates, but they don’t know how to communicate their strengths on their resume or during interviews. By asking strategic questions similar to the ones mentioned in this article, recruiters will learn how to understand and relate candidate strengths to the target job.
The second component of this workshop is focused on presenting these strengths optimally in a resume. It will involve balancing the candidate’s technical skills with their business acumen.
I will show you how to shorten your coaching process so you’re not spending hours with each candidate.
I’ll also break down the roles you’re currently hiring for into interview questions, specifically designed to get candidates speaking about their accomplishments. These will come with scorecards that you can mark up and share with your candidates. All of these resources will be created for your firm specifically so that your branding and style are woven throughout.
2. How to shorten a resume within 15 minutes
This workshop teaches recruiters how to shorten resumes within a few minutes and without compromising the resume’s content.
I will talk to you about how HR Managers, technical staff, decision-makers, and interviewers all read resumes. What are they looking for? How can you quickly answer their questions in your candidates’ resumes without alienating your reader?
I cover all this and more during this workshop.
3. Using resume design best practices to spotlight candidates’ strengths
In this workshop, I will show you how to make quick edits to resumes to help your candidate make an impression more effectively.
Based on how people read resumes and resume heat maps, I will share design principles to make different resume sections immediately engaging.
Where do readers pay the most attention? How can you slow them down and get them to read the resume and not skim it? How do you use design best practices to shine the light on your candidates’ biggest strengths and away from their perceived flaws?
I have been working as a resume writer and interview coach for ten years; I know exactly what candidates struggle with and have built systems to help them overcome their unique challenges.
4. The basics of interview coaching
In this workshop, I’ll show you how to teach candidates how to carry themselves in an interview, how to dress, and all the fundamental do’s and don’t’s of in-person and Skype or Zoom interviews.
Additionally, I’ll talk deeply about how to answer general background questions like “Tell us about yourself” based on the candidate’s unique career history. We’ll touch on the three frameworks I use to get candidates to speak about themselves succinctly and in-line with the role they’re interviewing for.
Finally, we’ll talk about the optimum answer length and structure and explain why answers that “show, don’t tell” get the best feedback from interviewers.
5. Coaching star candidates
This workshop is specifically designed to help you coach your star performers. In this, I’ll show you the most important closing questions to ask, how candidates can maximize their impact with thank-you notes and follow-ups, and in which order they should talk about their history. Here are a few templates for following up and fixing interview mistakes.
We’ll cover top-down and bottom-up approaches to stories shared during interviews and how to use both to improve recall so that they don’t falter or end the interview on a low note.
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If you prefer to deliver this workshop yourself, please download my slides here for free.
Alternatively, if you’d like to refer candidates to our interview coaching service, you can check out the details here.
Would you prefer that we train you one-on-one to do mock interviews yourself? Email me at contact@careertuners.com so I can develop a custom quote for you.
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