How to Prepare for a Job Interview

A job interview is the final step before getting the job. It’s the most critical step because if the candidate does not convince the decision maker of being the ideal candidate, the job goes to someone else. Preparing for the interview is not to be taken lightly. To win this tough competition, one needs to invest time and effort, must feel commitment, and must persevere. Following are a few practical steps.

1. The single most important thing to do during interview preparation is to hold live mock interviews with someone experienced and competent in this area.

°         Practice the 20 most common interview questions again and again until you feel confident.

°         Focus on learning about the prospective employer’s problems and immediate needs.

°         Prepare for reciting fact-based success stories from your past that are relevant to what you’ve learned about the hirer’s needs.

°         Practice, practice, and practice some more. You’ll be happy you did!

1. Learn as much as you can about the company.

°         Begin with the company’s Web site, and look at every page. Drill down into details to mine specifics you could talk about with the interviewer.

°         Find out who are the people you’ll interview with, and evaluate their LinkedIn profiles.

°         Check out who they’re connected with on LinkedIn.

°         Attempt sleuthing into the company via these connections to find out about the company’s culture and, possibly, specifics about the position.

°         Find out what your interviewers are tweeting about. This might be challenging because people sometimes use pseudonyms. Use topsy.com for your research.

°         Do searches on YouTube and Vimeo. Don’t underestimate what you can find out in these hidden places.

°         Look for and review blogs posted by your contacts at the company.

°         Use free tools to gain additional knowledge—for example, klout.com and blog.linkedin.com.

°         Do Google searches on both the interviewers and the firm. Go through several pages of the results.

1. Answer the following questions.

°         Do you fit into the organization?

°         Do you have the skills, education, and experience required?

°         Do you possess experiences and skills to offer in support of the company’s mission statement?

°         Can you recite via a vignette or two some past experiences that would serve as a natural evolution into company growth?

1. Engage with the interviewer via questions that prove your value.

°         Ask questions you already know the answers to.

°         Show the interviewer that you’re very familiar with the industry and the company’s competition.

Preparing for a winning interview is hard work and takes many hours, if not days. By doing such preparation, one gains not only specific knowledge but also a lot of confidence.

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Why Are Interviewers So Selective?

Unlike past scenarios, job interviews have become harder and harder. Employers have an abundance of very qualified applicants, many of them working with interview coaches to elevate their interviewing skills. The outcome is that it raises the bar for everyone. There are many books available to job seekers to read and brush up on interviewing skills, but the problem associated with that is that many of those books are old and reflect the thinking of the era in which they were written.

Employers have become sophisticated in the area of interviewing candidates. In the past, after snail mailing a cover letter and résumé to a target company, a job applicant would receive a phone call invitation for an interview with the hiring manager. Nowadays there’s very little personal interaction at the front end of the process. The résumé submittal is electronic and goes directly into a database. The résumé gets buried there until its resurrection via the appropriate keywords a recruiter is interested in. Then comes the initial screening-out phone interview, and only if that goes well is a candidate invited to a series of interviews with often large numbers of people. There are a number of reasons for these changes.

Today’s employers react to the current economic condition by focusing on higher productivity through the application of various technologies, new and better software, and outsourcing in order to reduce staff and associated staff costs such as office space, pensions, and health care.

The hiring process today is also significantly more selective than in the past. Companies need people who can quickly learn constantly new technologies, can adapt to continuous changes, can reinvent their own jobs, and can function while changes occur at faster and faster rates.

When employers select new employees, they’re looking for those types who can provide solutions resulting in increased efficiency and, at the same time, reduced costs. Otherwise, jobs will move offshore.

Nobody’s job is safe anymore. The past paradigm of building a solid career is no longer valid. People out of work need information and intelligence about growth opportunities and must adapt their skills to meet employers’ requirements. This is a challenging proposition for job seekers—and especially for those who are more advanced in age than other job seekers. Waiting for things to happen is often futile and certainly demoralizing. Career counselors can be of great assistance, but the majority of the burden is on the job seeker.

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Résumé Keywords Are the Keys to Be Found

Most of the résumés employers receive either as hard copies or that are uploaded electronically reside in databases. If those databases were in graphic form, each résumé would resemble a lonely tombstone in a cemetery. In the majority of cases, submitting résumés is futile because they get resurrected only if they include keywords—specifically, those keywords used via computer queries made by employers, recruiters, or hiring managers.

Typically, keywords are phrases and nouns that have to do with technical and professional areas of expertise; projects; industry-related jargons; tasks; achievements; job titles; and so on. That contradicts what we suggested years ago by saying that it’s verbs that make a résumé desirable. We now find that an effective combination of nouns, phrases, and verbs is necessary because the human eye is attracted to verbs, whereas applicant tracking systems—the kinds of software used by employers and recruiters—are searching for keywords.

Applicant tracking systems are searching for keywords that appear primarily near the top of the résumé. Therefore, it is advisable to include keywords in the résumé’s first paragraph—immediately after the contact information. Additional keywords should appear in lists as bulleted items in the section that follows and that could be titled Skills.

Appropriate keywords should be harvested from job descriptions or ads for job openings. Commonly, a job description is rich in listing a job’s requirements in terms of skills and accomplishments. For instance, if the position is technical, the ad often lists computer languages, proprietary software, and the like.

Pam Dixon lists such examples in her book Job Searching Online for Dummies, as follows.

Keyword summary, example 1	PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY: Award-winning corporate controller with more than 10 years’ experience in two $500-million corporations. Impressive record in implementing financial record database architecture that saved over $2 million annually. Proficient in Oracle, Prism, Red Brick, and SAP systems, as well as MS Project, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and FrontPage.
Keyword summary, example 2	SKILLS Languages: C, SQL, C++, Assembler, Pascal Software: Oracle Developer 2000, Informix NewEra, FoxPro OS: UNIX, Windows NT/95/3.11, MS-DOS RDBMS: Oracle7, Informix 7

The inclusion of keywords in a résumé requires a combination of art, science, and, often unfortunately, learning via trial and error. The ideal résumé contains 12 to 15 keywords. On one hand, if it does not have enough keywords, chances of its being found are diminished. On the other hand, too many keywords could put the résumé somewhat out of context.

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The Interview Process Needs to Be Understood

Many interviewers don’t know how to interview, and the majority of candidates are not sufficiently prepared for the test. Because that situation is a given, a candidate can improve the chances for hire by better understanding the interview process itself and the emotional aspects of the interview.

Conversely from what our instinct might tell us, the interview focus is not on the candidate but on the interviewer’s needs and on satisfying them. And by the way, this is done on a competitive basis, because the candidate who appears to be the best fit into the interviewer’s company’s culture and who shows passion and excitement will be offered the job.

This may sound obvious, but beyond the exchange of information and the validation of career facts are a lot of emotions that intrude themselves into the interview process. For example, a candidate’s natural tendency is to walk into the interview and start selling because the clock is ticking. My suggestion, however, is to hold off the selling and instead, start easy talk. Establish a relationship with the other party, and work on strengthening that relationship until the interviewer stops it when it’s time to move on with the interview.

At that point, the interviewer will ask a guided, open-ended question such as, “Tell me about yourself” or “Why are you interested in this job?” because he wants to obtain a point of reference for how the candidate is positioning himself. A candidate who understands the interview process will give a very brief answer to the question and then turn the conversation so that the interviewer starts talking about his problems. After all, this is what the interview is really all about.

The candidate should indeed bring up and interject facts from past professional experience to prove a history of dealing with similar issues and being able to resolve them to the satisfaction of customers, bosses, and others. Make sure you provide such facts, because otherwise, whatever you say is no more than anecdotal hearsay or your opinion. This phase is most likely the crux of the interview, since now, the interviewer is analyzing your candidacy for fit, skills, and character. This is when you have to project lots of confidence. This is what you’re selling, and this is what the interviewer wants to buy.

If you can follow the foregoing guidelines, you’ll improve your chances to win the competition. The last step before you formally accept an offer involves learning the tactics of negotiating a compensation package.

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Getting Coached Is Catching On

One of the most basic rules in economics deals with supply and demand. Today’s job market certainly has a significant supply: 13.9 million people looking for jobs. But demand has been meager for the past several years; it probably will continue to be for the near future; and—at least at this point—it does not show any robustness. The immediate impact of this discord manifests itself by only a few people getting jobs.

In theory, the process of getting a job is simple: human resources department employees, outside recruiters, and hiring managers review multitudes of applicant résumés and eliminate all except outstanding ones. There are many of the latter, and less-than-outstanding résumés get filed in the black hole. A further elimination process is in place via phone or video screenings, with the target objective to request applicants appear for in-person interviews—but typically, no more than three to five of the seemingly best prospects. Ultimately, of course, only one is going to get the congratulatory letter.

In practice, since more and more job seekers know the rules of the game, they’re trying to maximize their chances by getting outside help. There’s been a significant uptick in the trend of job seekers’ hiring professional résumé writers, followed by the trend of working with career coaches to specifically improve interview skills. Both professional résumé writers and people who offer career coaching services appear to be costly. Plus the expense comes at a person’s time of trauma, anguish, and high frustration level, but what is the cost of those things combined with lack of a steady paycheck?

Most people realize that job seeking has become very competitive in every occupational field. Even most colleges, as part of their applicant-screening process, interview potential incoming students before making final determinations. As a career coach specializing in the interview process, I see more and more such college student applicants who engage my services. Furthermore, many military veterans returning from years of service find themselves unprepared for the next phase in their lives, and they reach out for assistance with job search counseling and interview skills enhancement.

It’s not enough to be able to say you did great things in past; you now need to sell that to someone who’s willing to pay you. Do you know how to do that?

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How to Turn Networking into Interviews

People in transition know that 60 to 80 percent of job seekers get their next positions through networking. Consequently and whenever possible, they focus their daily activities on such networking. But despite their—sometimes admittedly awkward—efforts, nothing comes of it. The reason is that they don’t have an understanding of the actual purpose of networking and how to turn it into interviews.

The purpose of networking is to cultivate relationships for advice, information, leads, and, hopefully, referrals. While it’s important to know others for this purpose, it’s equally important that those others know you. Most people are willing to network, but they have the right to expect you to (1) focus on specific companies and (2) demonstrate to them that networking is a give-and-take transaction, whereby they, too, may get from you in turn some industry intelligence.  For those who don’t know how to go about approaching a person for the purpose of networking, here’s a simple script that can be used either over the phone or via e-mail.

My name is Jane Jones. Our mutual acquaintance Stan Smith suggested I give you a call [send you an e-mail] because he feels
you’re an expert in the pharmaceutical industry. Stan suggested you might be of assistance to me. I’m in transition and looking
for a role as a marketing director. I don’t expect you to know of an opening in this area, but perhaps you can share with me
your thoughts about ways I can find out who’s hiring.

The mechanics of a networking dialogue should have the following components. An initial rapport building to establish the relationship. An agenda for the purpose—and that consider how you, too, can add value. Try finding out whom the other person knows or what good contacts the person has. Another element is likability. You must develop your relationship on trust, integrity, and shows of enthusiasm, motivation, and drive. Nobody enjoys a conversation with someone who’s depressed—with the possible exception of a psychologist! And last, get engaged in the exchange, and try to feel comfortable asking for referrals. When you get them, make sure you keep your host in the loop.

If you follow these guidelines, it’s very likely that you’ll generate more interviews. In that event, make sure you’re well prepared. You don’t want to drop the ball once you’re so close to scoring.

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It is the resume that is holding you back

Could this be?  After all it worked in past and others who helped you with it made significant improvements.  Despite that, vis a vis other outstanding resumes it pales and is ineffective.  In order for your resume to propel you to the point that somebody considers you as a potential candidate is has to have at least the following elements.  Above all the gist of the resume has to be written in a way that conveys the reader that you have what it takes to solve his problems and chances are that you will excel.

• A strong career summary following the contact information. This is the first thing read. It sets the tone for the entire résumé. And it should be designed to attract, intrigue as well as compel the reader to keep reading more.
• An attractive visual presentation. This means the résumé has to look good on paper. The ideal résumé design has lots of white space, looks clean, and invites the reader to want to learn more about the candidate. A résumé is merely a marketing tool—the first impression a potential employer has of you.
• Passing the 10-second test. Résumés are being reviewed by recruiters and others who read many résumés and have to weed out worthwhile ones from those that are wastes of time. A professional reviewer does this for each résumé in 10 to 30 seconds. If it’s not attractive, your résumé will be discarded.
• Evidence that you will be able to deliver. This is the reason you have to list your accomplishments. Don’t confuse accomplishments with tasks that someone in your position typically performs; the interviewer already knows the tasks just from your title. From the way many résumés are worded, they come across as doers, not strongly as achievers. The distinction between the two is decisive. This is a common mistake made by nonprofessional résumé writers. To be effective and create excitement, a great résumé helps the decision maker envision your delivering similar achievements at the decision maker’s company.
• The right keywords. In addition to the human eye’s scan, most résumés nowadays get scanned into an applicant-tracking system and retrieved exclusively if they contain the right keywords based on a computer query. Keywords are critical because even the best applicant will miss the opportunity to compete if the résumé lacks the right keywords.

So, now the question becomes, What should be your next step? In principle, you have several options.

• Based on the issues covered here, you can continue having people help you with your résumé or you can buy books, read articles, and work toward making your résumé more desirable.
• You can engage a professional editor once you’ve finished your work on the résumé. That will assure you that it is perfect in terms of format, grammar, usage, spacing, punctuation, and more.
• You can engage a professional résumé writer. Most of the professional résumé writers are accredited, certified, and experienced. Some are pretty good; others are outstanding. You’ll want to interview them first for your résumé and cover letter.

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