So you finally get invited to a job interview after you’ve send out your CV dozens of times. After you finished, you feel like you did a good job interview. But somehow they reject you anyway. The reason: “We had another candidate that was a better match with our company”.
How frustrating! But could you have done anything differently? The answer is: Probably! Because, like everything in life, doing job interviews is a skill that can be trained, improved through hard work, preparation, and by knowing what parts of your experience your audience wants to hear about.
I’ve sat down with job seekers in hundreds of different job interviews for dozens of companies, big and small. I have probably had ten times that amount of people interviewing with me before I even send their CV’s to my clients. I have used this experience and spoken to hiring managers and recruiting specialists over the years to create guidelines with the secrets for doing a good job interview. But what did I see in common with all of them for a good job interview: the preparation and practice.
The question is, how do you prepare?
Preparation to a good job interview
You should think about what part of your experience is most interesting for the job interviewer and prepare these stories. I have seen so many unprepared candidates tell me about the start of their career and slowly build up chronologically to the present. It's natural, most of us tell what's interesting for us. But you should focus on what's interesting for the interviewer.
Most interviewers I know, do not really care about what you did 10+ years ago. They are far more interested in what you did in the most recent years and specifically in what’s relevant for the role your applying for right now.
Most of the time you get a few minutes to make an introduction. I believe this part can be prepared perfectly and this is the moment to impress your interviewers with the best version of yourself. I personally love it when candidates give me a brief summary of their career and then deep dive into the most relevant experience with specifics.
This is a good example of how to do your introduction for a good job interview: I started my career after I got my bachelor's in IT in 2002. I have now worked in IT for 18 years, most specifically with data for the last 9 years. I worked for big companies like Shell, Samsung and Philips. Most recently I was a Data Scientist for Heineken. When I started for Heineken 2 years ago, they asked me to help them create new ways to work with AI. However, I quickly found out that their data wasn’t organized properly and so I started a project to…. Etc.
Tips to have a successful and good job interview
In my years of preparing candidates, I always received great feedback on the tips I gave and for taking the time to help them prepare. Therefore I decided to share this valuable information with you. By sharing it in this manner I will be able to reach more people and prevent some people from going crazy after receiving another rejection.
I want to share with you a structure that you can use when you are talking about your experience. I include some tips on what to do and what to avoid when you are talking about your experience.
If you have an opinion on the subject of this article I’d love to hear it. Please feel free to share it with me by leaving a comment or mail me at vincent@spruit.ai😊