How to ace a job interview in 3 steps

Whether you’re looking for your first-ever job or your 10th, performing well in a job interview can be stressful, and everyone experiences a level of anxiety. With the current job market as competitive as ever, being well prepared for job interview questions will increase your chances of a successful job interview.

1.    Be prepared

An interview is your opportunity to find out about the job and your potential employer. So it makes sense to research the company and find out more about them, what products or services they offer, where their offices are located and what their company vision, mission and values are. An interview is also about preparing for likely questions that you will be asked. Some of the most common questions asked include:

·     Tell me about yourself?

·     What do you know about our company?

·     Can you tell me the name of our CEO?

·     What are your strengths?

·     What are your development areas or weaknesses?

·     What motivates you?

·     Tell me about a time when you handled a difficult situation?

·     How do you define great team work?

·     What attracted you to this role?

·     How do you relax?

·     What are your hobbies?

·     What makes you the best candidate?

2.    Make an impression

Arriving on time or slightly earlier than your scheduled appointment and you will make a good impression. There’s nothing worse than the interview commencing with an apology for being late. Use eye contact when you greet and meet anyone in the business and ensure you apply a firm handshake as part of your greeting. Before the interview consider your social media footprint. Many recruiters and employers will scan social media to determine if a candidate has the right fit for their culture. Don’t give them a change to dismiss you - activate your privacy settings on your accounts to restrict access to family and friends only. Dressing for the interview is important. Dress for the occasion that is appropriate to the company and industry and that demonstrates you’re professional and neat. Turn off your mobile phone, limit your jewellery, cover any exposed tattoos, have neatly trimmed nails and use breath mints if you are a smoker – you only get one chance to make a first impression and you want to be remembered for who you are, not for how you smell!

3.    Practice

Interviews can be stressful. Understanding what behavioural interview techniques consist of will allow you to practice how you respond to the most likely behavioural questions. Questions such as “tell me about a time…”, “describe a time when you had to…” and “give me an example of when…”. I recommend using the STAR model for answering these types of questions.

Situation: Provide a context – what happened?

Task: Describe the challenge and expectations - what was required of you?

Action: Detail your specific action - what you actually did?

Results: Explain the results - what was the outcome?

Situation: “I was working in the customer billing team. A customer called upset that their bill was higher than their average amount”.

Task: “I needed to address the client’s enquiry and find out what went wrong”.

Action: “Firstly, I apologised to the client and got the detail from them and started to investigate this with our accounts team. We discovered an error with the code assigned to their product and we arranged to have the codes adjusted for this client. We also arranged to check on other client’s billings too with this particular code”.

Result: “When I called the client back later that afternoon, I explained the error and I offered a goodwill discount on her next order. The client was happy with this and continued to order from us. We were pleased that this was also an isolated incident”.

The STAR technique, when done well, is a great way to structure your answers through a story. It provides a framework for presenting clear examples from your experience to answer behavioural questions in an interview. I recommend you invest time wisely in preparing how you answer these questions using the STAR technique.

Carla Egan is a professional career coach, trainer and behavioural profiler. Carla combines her coaching skills with her 20-year career experience in inbound contact centre management to assist job seekers, recruiters, small business owners and organisations with their recruitment services and change management requirements.