Basic tips on how to bring your Powerpoint interview presentation to life

The 3 areas that make a great 2nd interview presentation are to provide strong.....

• Content
• Delivery
• Appearance

The following focuses on the area of appearance and certain simple things to consider that can make huge differences to how your presentation can come across visually.

For most candidates when faced with a 2nd interview presentation, content isn’t the main challenge – it’s getting past the inertia of staring at a blank screen and knowing where to start.

A great starting point is to put together your Presentation template, so that the backdrop to your content looks slick, professional and vibrant, but at the same point conveys the strength of you content clearly.

A great looking presentation won’t secure you the role if the content behind it is insufficient – however, it will give you confidence in your presentation and add value to showcasing your presentation skills.

If you are a candidate who hasn’t put together a 2nd interview for a long time or are not confident in your IT skills – don’t be overly daunted as it can be more straight forward than you think.

I’ve chosen POWERPOINT as the basis for the tips – purely as this is the most common format candidates use for 2nd interview presentations, and is arguably the most user friendly and simple to navigate.

However, all of these areas can be implemented across other presentation formats.

Choosing a background template

By opening up POWERPOINT and clicking on “Design” on the toolbar at the top this will open up several options in terms of which template to use for your presentation.

These are all user friendly so try to consider during your selection

• Choosing a template with a fair amount of white space, as this will allow you to input a higher volume of content more clearly
• Don’t worry too much about the colour scheme around the white space, this is easy to change to your liking which will be explained later
• Try to choose a template with a white background if possible – these tend to be easier for interviewers to be able to read information off and also any print outs you may be asked to bring with you or hand out at the end of the interview will also often will be clearer.

For more advanced users, by searching online, there are 1000s of different Free Powerpoint templates you can find and use.

Make sure you add a title to each page

This might seem basic, but is surprising how many candidates not used to Interview presentations do not do it.

It’s important that at the beginning of each page the interviewers can see which part of the presentation you are just about to talk about.

Adding the logo of the company you are interviewing for to each page

 A simple but nice touch on an Interview presentation to give it a corporate feel can be to use insert the company’s logo at the corner of each page (Which corner is up to you as long as it is consistent throughout the presentation – but top left is most common).

This can often simply be copied and pasted from their website or searched Online.

Colour scheming your presentation

Colour scheming your presentation is an easy but massively effective tool to use to bring your presentation to life and is easy to do (see link below).

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-or-delete-a-custom-theme-color-f122fc2d-d83a-4edc-b9f9-b525dc6880c2

Try to choose colours which aren’t so “loud” they distract from the content, so to this regard darker colours can really be effective against a white background – or if you want to be particularly clever match the colours to the company logo.

You will notice when selecting colours there is an option called “Eyedropper” – This is a fantastic tool where by clicking on it, it opens up a box on your main presentation so that you can hover over and match to exactly the same colour as text/photos/logos already on there.

Choose the right font and stick with it

Choosing the right font is crucial to a presentation.

Some of most effective ones include Calibri, Tahoma, Arial and Lato – However, there are 100s out there, just ensure it’s clear and easy to read.

The most important tip with Font is to ensure you are consistent with which text you use across your presentation as this can greatly effect the look of your presentation – so avoid using different fonts on different pages.

Use appropriate images to add relevant pictorials to white space

During a presentation, some pages will require more content than others.

For pages where the content is limited try to avoid large areas of unused white space on your presentation and insert relevant pictures that complement this.

These can really enhance the words/charts on the page and look visually effective and interesting.

Picture from the company you are interviewing for’s website are particularly effective and resonate with the interviewers.

Online searches again provide plenty of free photos you can use for this purpose.

However, only use pictures/photos if there is sufficient white space for you to be able to do this

Practice using Smart-Art

Using Smart Art is a great tool to avoid a presentation which is just a series of similar looking lists on each page.

This can come across as dull by the interviewers so use of charts and boxes to contain information can break up the presentation to make it continually different and interesting to look at – and can also really enhance the key points you want to stand out from the page.

I would recommend anyone who is putting together an interview presentation and normally sticks to listed information under bullet points to take some time to play around and practice with Smart-Art (Link below)

It’s easier to use than you may imagine and really can make a different to the aesthetics of your presentation.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-smartart-graphic-fac94c93-500b-4a0a-97af-124040594842

Like most tips, not all of these will be for everyone, but hopefully having some ideas of the options you have available to you can break the ice in terms of how to bring your content to life.

Paul