How to Prepare for an Interview

Here are the steps I tell my candidates to best prepare for an on-site / virtual on-site interview:

• Dress to impress (First Impressions are key, and you can never overdress for an interview)
• If your interview is in person have 3 copies of your resume printed out and ready to go.

Step 1. Research the company you are interviewing for. While researching the company jot down 5-7 bullet points of things you discover. This will help you better understand the company & help you to come up with great questions to ask to help you assess your interest level.

Step 2. Create questions to ask the hiring manager during the interview. Interviews go both ways. You are interviewing the client just as much as they are interviewing you! I like to break the questions into two parts. These two parts are personal questions and professional questions. For personal questions you want these geared directly towards the person interviewing you. An example question would be “What brought you over to ABC Company?” For professional questions these are geared towards getting to know the company and position more. An example question for this could be “What would your expectations of me be in the first few months?”. I recommend having at least 3 questions each for Personal and Professional questions. ?

Step 3. Be prepared to give detailed answers about your experience. We want to avoid surface level & vague answers. Be sure to go into detail for your answers so that you can paint a picture for the manager and give them clarity on what you did and what you assisted with. If you can hit these 3 points in your answers you should be good to go: Where you did it, how you did it, and the process behind what you did. Be mindful to keep your answers within about a 3-minute time span or less.

Step 4. Be ready for the Situational Questions. Situational questions are made to see how you answer on the fly. These are usually more difficult to answer because there is not a right or wrong answer, but better and worse answers. A common situational question is (Tell me about a time you had a problem at work with another co-worker and how your resolved it?). The key with answering these questions is to make sure the positive outweigh the negatives.

Step 5. Ending the interview with nothing left on the table. When ending an interview, instead of asking the famous “what are the next steps?” question, I like to ask a different question: “Based on how our interview today went, and you learning more about my skills and experience, would you have any concerns about moving forward with me for this opportunity?” This will allow you to clarify any misconceptions that the hiring manager may have made during the interview.

After the interview be sure to thank the manager and anyone else who participated for their time, and always send a thank you letter as a final courtesy.??