Break through the job interview – II

Last week, we began to discuss the five key things that you need to do in order to break through any job interview. We also shared testimony from one young female graduate who used this framework to for the first time break through an interview after several attempts in 18 months where she failed to get any job because she was not aware of and so did not use the framework under discussion here. In fact, a couple of friends and relatives have also recently been able to pass their job interviews without problems after they engaged this powerful framework.

Under part 1 of this topic, we discussed the first two of the five key things that you need to do in order to prepare effectively for your job interview: studying the employing organisation and understanding the job. Today, we will discuss the next three things that you need to do in order to maximise if not guarantee your chance of breaking through the interview.

3. Understand the details of the qualities of the ideal candidate required:

It is important to know exactly what kind of person the employing company needs. Some of the qualities are described in the advert, but you stand to get more details by talking to those in the know inside the employing company or organisation: may be the job requires a person who is very tough, may be the job requires someone with a very calm disposition. The job may require someone that is able to multi-task or one that can be a reliable delegate working on behalf of a boss that is busy with other things or a boss that needs reinforcing. Some of these attributes may not be published in the job advert. Try your best to get as much additional information through informal channels so that you can supplement what you learn from the advert.

4. Analyse and compare candidates:

Remember that when you are interviewing for a job, you are basically competing for the one opportunity, against many other candidates that also want the same opportunity. You cannot put up your best competitive performance if you have no details of your opponents. It is important that you do a bit of research to try and get the names and profiles of the other candidates. If it is very difficult to get the details of the other candidates, use templates with expected profiles of the candidates. Once you have the profiles of the other candidates, do a SWOT analysis for each one of them, listing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for each candidates including your own. This analysis will help you to craft a winning strategy – what do you need to say in the interview in order to exploit the weaknesses of the other candidates and in order to demonstrate that you equally have the strengths that other candidates have or to prove that those strengths are not as necessary for the job. You would have to deliver this with tact.

5. Script and rehearse your answer to “Why should they employ me?”:

You may have studied the employing organisation, understood the details of the job and characteristics of the ideal candidate. You may as well have done a very good comparative analysis for all the remaining candidates. But, if you do not rehearse some of the key answers, you may be unnecessarily putting yourself at a disadvantage. In particular, you need to have a well-crafted and fully rehearsed answer to the question on why the employer should employ you and not any of the other candidates. If you rehearse this answer many times, until it becomes part of you, you will have greatly improved your chance of breaking through the interview.

—To be continued next week…