Supposedly the economy is getting better. I’ve seen it as I travel around the country speaking to job search groups. More people are celebrating new jobs, and more people are interviewing. That’s great!
How are you preparing for your job interviews? I didn’t prepare much, except emotionally… I really should have prepared more with my responses, scripted them out, rehearsed them, and gotten really comfortable with them.
I also should have brainstormed stories to use in my responses, so I could recall significant events and quantifiable things (like how much I generated in sales, etc.), but I didn’t do that. I thought off-the-cuff was good enough, since I’m such a smart guy.
Yeah, right.
Prepare! Seriously, prepare!
In light of that, here are a few resources to help you have a better job interview:
From today’s LinkedIn headlines, on Forbes, Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only Three True Job Interview Questions. They are:
- Can you do the job?
- Will you love the job?
- Can we tolerate working with you?
Not sure how I feel about those, but if you think about the dozen questions you’ll be asked, and how your responses will really help the interviewer understand how you would answer the three questions above, then you can come across as the stronger candidate… or, the right candidate.
On Twitter, I saw a tweet from @MyStaffingPro pointing to John Sullivan’s common and critical interview problems: The Top 30 Most Common (and Critical) Interview Problems, followed up with 20 More of the Most Common (and Critical) Interview Problems.
50 is a lot to go through, but if you are preparing for an interview, browse through them and understand the issues.
I remember going through a two day workshop and learning how to interview better. In my next two interviews I remember thinking I was 100 times more prepared than the person asking the questions – it was almost disgusting how unprepared interviewers are… simply reading from a list of questions and not really digesting the answers. The next time I saw people from my workshop I heard the same thing. As Dr. Sullivan says:
What’s wrong with corporate job interviews? Pretty much everything!
Do the best you can, prepare, and be the thing that is not wrong with job interviews!
