Think Through Your Answers
Every play you make during your job interview is crucial to achieving your goal. This is why you need to think through every answer you provide during the interview.
When answering questions during the interview, dont feel pressured to immediately provide a response. This is key to providing well-thought out answers that will impress the interviewer. Its also important to remember to breathe and take a few seconds to think about the question being asked. This will take the pressure off of answering the question and youll feel more confident in your response.
Establishing The Requirements Of The Position
The process of creating an interview score sheet can be helpful in establishing the key requirements for the position. For example though your score sheet for someone working in sales might specify the need for an extroverted personality this is less important for someone working in a more technical department.
Tips For Great Job Interviews
From researching the company to handling certain key interview questions, make sure you make a great impression and ace your next job interview by following these 20 tips.
Want to ace your next interview and land thatopen job youve been seeking? Here are 20 tips to help you prepare.1. Research the industry and company.An interviewer may ask how you perceive his company’s position in its industry, who the firm’s competitors are, what its competitive advantages are, and how it should best go forward. For this reason, avoid trying to thoroughly research a dozen different industries. Focus your job search on just a few industries instead.
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Write A Profile That Summarizes The Important Facts:
Resumes with a good summary have better chances of getting interview calls. Share your experiences in the summary. List all the high-profile companies you have worked for. In other words, select whatever facts are most impressive about you and use the resume summary to highlight those.
Also Read: Write the perfect resume for your first job.
What Is An Interview Score Sheet
An interview score sheet is used by hiring teams to evaluate candidates fairly and objectively during the shortlisting and interview process. Each interviewer scores the candidate on the same set of criteria and the hiring team can then meet and compare the scores of the candidates.
Interview score sheets give structure to evaluation processes and interviews helping hiring teams to evaluate candidates more consistently, fairly, and on the criteria that are most important to their success if they join the organization.
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What Is A Behavioral Interview How To Prepare And Sample Questions
What is a behavioral interview? Candidates for employment often ask what the difference is between a regular job interview and a behavioral interview. What should you do to get ready if the employer is going to ask you behavioral based interview questions?
In many ways, a behavioral interview resembles other types of job interviews. There isn’t a difference in the actual format of the job interview. You will still meet with an interviewer and respond to interview questions. The difference is in the type of interview questions that they will ask you.
Review information on the difference between behavioral and traditional job interviews, examples of questions, and how to handle a behavioral interview.
Create Something That Goes Viral
YouTube is wonderful for many reasons, one being that you dont have to have money or power to become popular. Videos go viral, and when they do, millions of people see them. Now, if you happen to create one that also ties in with something you do for a living, or that targets a potential employer, thats when you could hit interview gold. A famous example of this is Justin Bieber. As a young boy, he posted a video of himself covering Justin Timberlakes Cry Me A River. We all know what happened to him. People in advertising have done this to score jobs at some of the worlds biggest agencies, including Crispin, Porter & Bogusky. YouTube works. You just need great content.
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Keeping Score: Using A Hiring Rubric
To assess candidate responses during an interview, it is common to use a numerical scale like this on an interview rubric: Unsatisfactory Below Average Average Above Average ExceptionalInterview questions should pertain to traits or factors that can be evaluated, such as: cultural fit, career motivation, social skills, teamwork, technical skills, leadership capabilities, critical thinking/problem solving, and, self-awareness.
While easy to derive an average score after ranking a candidate on each factor, what if the search committee or hiring team wants to prioritize certain factors? You can weight them by assigning a percentage to each factor providing that the total is 100 percent. In the example below, note how the weighted average score for each candidate compares to the original average score.
Much like the applicant screening process, each member of the committee or team completes a rubric following the interviews and submits it to a third party to compile the scores for each candidate and provide an average of responses. Candidates with the highest scores are interviewed another time or presented with an offer of employment.
When using hiring rubrics, feedback is recorded and stored in a central location andmost importantlycandidates are assessed efficiently, consistently, and objectively! To request formattable files of the examples presented, please contact .
The Best Way To Prepare
What’s the best way to prepare? It’s important to remember that you will not know what type of interview will take place until you are sitting in the interview room. So, prepare answers to traditional interview questions.
Then, since you don’t know exactly what situations you will be asked about if it’s a behavioral interview, refresh your memory and consider some special situations you have dealt with or projects you have worked on. You may be able to use them to help frame responses.
Prepare stories that illustrate times when you have successfully solved problems or performed memorably.
The stories will be useful to help you respond meaningfully in a behavioral interview. You can research the STAR interview response technique, which offers a way of answering behavioral interview questions.
Finally, review the job description, if you have it, or the job posting or ad. You may be able to get a sense of what skills and behavioral characteristics the employer is seeking from reading the job description and position requirements.
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Validity And Predictive Power
There is extant data which puts into question the value of job interviews as a tool for selecting employees. Where the aim of a job interview is ostensibly to choose a candidate who will perform well in the job role, other methods of selection provide greater predictive power and often lower costs.
Interview structure issues
As discussed previously, interviews with more structure are considered best practice, as they tend to result in much better decisions about who will be a good performing employee than interviews with less structure. Structure in an interview can be compared to the standardization of a typical paper and pencil test: It would be considered unfair if every test taker were given different questions and a different number of questions on an exam, or if their answers were each graded differently. Yet this is exactly what occurs in an unstructured interview interviewers decide the number and content of questions, rate responses using whatever strategy they want , and may score some applicants more harshly than others. Thus, interviewers who do not consider at least a moderate amount of structure may make it hard for an organization’s interview to effectively select candidates that best fit the work needs of the organization.
Interviewer rating reliability
Dress For The Job Or Company
Today’s casual dress codes do not give you permission to dress as “they” do when you interview. It is important to know what to wear to an interview and to be well-groomed. Whether you wear a suit or something less formal depends on the company culture and the position you are seeking. If possible, call to find out about the company dress code before the interview.
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To Increase Objectivity In Your Hiring Process
Hiring is, by nature, subjective. Considerations like cultural fit and leadership style are hard to quantitatively define. However, by quantifying as much of the process as you can, you remove the potential for unrelated variables to affect who you hire. An interview scorecard with objective metrics means:
- Hiring decisions arent affected by which candidates you interviewed when you were having a bad day
- Candidates wont blend together, and youll be able to recall whose answer to question five was better
- Better-looking but less-qualified applicants will lose out to the less put-together but more experienced ones
What Does An Interview Score Sheet Look Like
Interview score sheets can take many forms but weve put together this interview score sheet template to help you get started.
Interview score sheets set out the criteria that every candidate is evaluated against. They usually have some common criteria across the organization with each location, department, or job role usually requiring some custom skills-based criteria.
Most score sheets use a simple rating system to keep things as objective as possible and make it as easy as possible to rank candidates. An additional comments section can be included for interviewers to capture any notes.
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Consider Additional Scoring Categories
A firm handshake, eye contact, good preparation and professional presentation have always been important in interviews. However, their impact is often left to the personal intuition of a hiring manager. Instead, you might consider creating additional scoring categories besides the questions. In this case, you would score potential hires for how they carry themselves during the interview, not just for the questions.
Other Applicant Discrimination: Weight And Pregnancy
Job applicants who are underweight , overweight or obese may face discrimination in the interview. The negative treatment of overweight and obese individuals may stem from beliefs that weight is controllable and those who fail to control their weight are lazy, unmotivated, and lack self-discipline. Underweight individuals may also be subject to appearance-related negative treatment. Underweight, overweight and obese applicants are not protected from discrimination by any current United States laws. However, some individuals who are morbidly obese and whose obesity is due to a physiological disorder may be protected against discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Employers are using social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to obtain additional information about job applicants. While these sites may be useful to verify resume information, profiles with pictures also may reveal much more information about the applicant, including issues pertaining to applicant weight and pregnancy. Some employers are also asking potential job candidates for their social media logins which has alarmed many privacy watch dogs and regulators.
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Drawbacks To Interview Scoring
Though there are many pros to using an interview scoring system, they also have their drawbacks. It takes time to develop a rating system that works for the organization and establish which criteria make for great hires. It can also take some trial and error to develop a rating system that accurately predicts candidate success on the job. The interview itself might take more time too, as they are often more thorough and require more notetaking than a casual candidate screening.
When involved with note-taking, it can also be harder for interviewers to personally engage with applicants. An interviewer looking at a scorecard instead of making good eye contact with the candidate might miss out on important body language cues. The overall candidate experience might also suffer from this lack of connectionthey might feel less engaged with the hiring manager and, in turn, the company.
There is another concern that interview scorecards dont allow for enough flexibility. Using predetermined interview questions might not flow as easily as natural conversation, which leads to feelings of awkwardness on both sides of the interview. There is also the chance that a candidate might not share as much information as they would during a more relaxed discussion.
How Do You Score The Rating System
What other methods do you use to keep your hiring process objective? Are you a longtime scorecard user? What tips do you have for others who are just getting started with interview scorecards?
Tell me about it in the comments below, or tweet me .
If you liked this article, share it on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook!
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More Knowledge = More Confidence
You started the research process with a tailored application, now its time to up the ante: Find out about the companys mission, achievements and milestones. Social media channels are as much of a must-read as profiles about the industry, the competition and the person youre interviewing with. The more you know, the more empowered and confident you will feel.
How Do You Determine What Questions To Include On The Scoring Sheet
There are several tools available that can help you create scorecards and decide what questions to ask. You can also determine which skills and traits are most important to the job youre interviewing for and then create a list of questions that will sufficiently allow you to determine a candidates abilities in relation to those skills.
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Keeping The Interview On Track
Choosing the best candidate is a near-impossible task when each candidate is asked a different set of questions and this is made worse when different members of the hiring team are interviewing different candidates.
An interview score sheet is a useful prompt to help interviewers keep the interview on track and helps ensure that any particularly important criteria for the position are covered off.
Follow In The Footsteps Of Upcoming Bands
When a band is trying to make it big , they dont have the money for big advertising campaigns. They dont even have the money for small ones. But they want you to show up in droves, so they get creative. They cover walls with wheat-paste posters, they set up websites with music samples, and do whatever then can to spread the word. You can do the same. If youre in a creative field, be it advertising, art, design, baking, or anything else with a visual aspect, a website is a great way to get your work out there. Then, find ways to advertise that site as cheaply as possible. Put cards in local stores, especially ones where potential employers might visit. Create a buzz around yourself, and you may just get that all-important phone call.
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The Final Step To Landing Your Dream Job Is Acing The Dreaded Interview Where Youll Definitely Be Hit With Tricky Questions That Could Throw You Off Your Game But Fret Not Heres How You Can Handle Those Difficult Questions And Score Your Coveted Spot
Youve finally landed The Interview after hours of resume editing and cover letter work. Its the big day and youre about to meet your executioners interviewers, who probably will include a talent recruiter from the company, and maybe even your potential boss. You are freaking out. What questions will they throw at you, and how are you going to make it out alive ?
The key to a successful interview lies in how prepared you are. Invest a bit of time into research into the company, as well as who you might be reporting to, before the day itself. And answering the following questions with confidence can make or break your chances at a job.
1. What can you offer us that other candidates cant?
This is a common question that is an opportunity for you to toot your own horn. Heres the tricky part: Make sure its a sensible #humblebrag. Going through your previous experience, collecting your thoughts and knowing what you want to say beforehand will help you out here.
Go over details in your resume and portfolio, and list concrete examples of how your previous experience and you will be an asset to the team. Its likely that the other candidates have similar qualifications, so youll need to elaborate on the assets and skill sets you have that others dont.
2. Why did you leave your last job?
3. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
4. What are your expectations of this job?
5. What do you consider to be your biggest failure?
6. What motivates you?
What Are Your Strengths And Weaknesses
Without doubt, this is a classic interview question. And there is a reason for this: your answer reveals much about who you are. In terms of your strengths, an unhealthy confidence is out of place. Do not purport to be the best in your field or even perfect. “I deal well with stress and like to learn new things” is a possible answer that scores points. With regard to your weaknesses, keep things in proportion and work towards a goal. Specify things that are easy to work on. For example, a lack of knowledge about a PC application is easy to deal with by taking courses.
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Use The Scrappiness Factor
For most people, your job doesnt boil down to any single task. Especially when youre early in your career, youre bound to wear a lot of different hats. If youre a video production assistant, for example, you might end up hauling equipment, fulfilling lunch orders, working with video editors, and coordinating schedulesall within the span of an hour.
Reach back through your experience one more time. Can you think of any occasions where you had to learn a new set of skills on the job, maybe even on the fly? This isnt fake it til you make it. This is scrappiness, and its a great quality to have. If you can show your interviewers youve been in a similar situation beforeone where you had to learn by doingand totally killed it, theyll see your inner resourcefulness that will serve you well in the job at hand.
