What are the best ways to showcase content creation experience in an interview?

When preparing your portfolio, don't go in with the idea of putting only communicative products, you must know who will review this information and what may engage them with your skills or capabilities.

As a content creator, you are obliged to explain your content creation process to the interviewer. Explain how you approach a task in hand by focusing on these key points - 1. Plan and Research: Explain your goal-oriented approach on planning the content strategy process and relevant research methodology used. 2. Drafting: It includes discussing your approach on converting the researched information to a well drafted piece. 3. Final Copy: Don't forget to mention your content tools used, inputs and feedback taken from various stakeholders and your pilot testing technique. Make sure you have a clear process in mind, a confident body language and a commanding voice tone to explain your process.

A very good way to present your process as a professional and as a person is to focus on who you are in order to highlight that process and what are the specific skills in which you can add value. Another suggestion is not to focus on explaining, but to share experiences from a very human point of view, which will make them emotionally engaged, and that can be a huge competitive advantage.

I am a huge fan of the STAR method and suggest having a set of stories based on your experience pre-prepared. Not so that it looks like you’re super rehearsed, but so you have relevant stories to support your experience. Talk especially about how your internal comms content work bridged gaps between teams, broke siloes, underscored transparent communication, or how it fostered communication to begin with. Demonstrable examples are key!

Explain with your own style and words what you want to communicate, always think about the receiver of it but without putting the focus entirely on trying to convince, but being authentic and natural in doing so, that will make you much more accessible.

This isn’t just something limited to content creation. Knowing best practices and demonstrating the willingness to learn and adapt, to think on your feet, to pivot when something isn’t working, and to adapt in rapidly changing circumstances are all hallmarks of creative thinking. Creativity isn’t just about content creation or storytelling; it’s about how well you think and resolve situations in sticky or rapidly evolving circumstances. How did what you created or built impact your readers and your organization in a way that solved their pain points? How did it effect change? What best practices did you discover?

Creativity cannot be invented, however, necessity can force things or results and this can provoke innovation, alternatives and solutions never thought of before. I believe that creativity has more to do with the identity of the communicator than with what I can generate by request or for a specific objective.

Big believer in asking questions. Remember: you’re interviewing your prospective workplace, too. Just as you’re being assessed, you, too, are assessing for career growth, culture fit, role fit, and learning culture… and if you’re not, you’re missing out on a key part of this process. Ask meaningful questions, not questions that a quick read through a company’s website will answer; thoughtful questions about content strategy, yes, but also about why a company chose certain tools and ask if they’ve considered another approach that might hit their target audiences in a new way, which is a good way to assess if they’d be open to new ideas…

I would ask questions, more to provoke feedback than to get a conversation going. Often silences communicate a lot and questions can be counterproductive if you don't have the experience to use them. If you ask them, you should do so not to reaffirm your position but to understand how the message has been received.